Asked by: Pam Cox (Labour - Colchester)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of prisoners have been released with a resettlement passport in each month since their introduction.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
The Government is committed to ensuring individuals have plans in place before release, identifying needs early, and linking people to the right support, such as housing, employment, and health services, to help reduce reoffending. No prisoners have left with a resettlement passport as formal introduction of a digital tool is yet to take place. However, development work has marked important progress in testing approaches to improve pre-release planning across the estate.
This testing, carried out in ten prisons and four probation regions, has gathered valuable insight and learning throughout, including a comprehensive understanding of current practice and identification of gaps and opportunities in service delivery. It has also provided insight relevant to ARNS (Assess, Risks, Needs and Strengths), supporting its development as part of HMPPS’s wider digital transformation strategy. ARNS is designed to modernise offender assessments by moving towards a more dynamic, collaborative, and strength-based approach to resettlement planning, offender management, and risk assessment.
These findings will feed into work to improve the operational processes to support preparation for release, to support delivery of recommendations from the Independent Review of Sentencing.
Asked by: Pam Cox (Labour - Colchester)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what progress has been made to introduce resettlement passports for prison leavers.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
The Government is committed to ensuring individuals have plans in place before release, identifying needs early, and linking people to the right support, such as housing, employment, and health services, to help reduce reoffending. No prisoners have left with a resettlement passport as formal introduction of a digital tool is yet to take place. However, development work has marked important progress in testing approaches to improve pre-release planning across the estate.
This testing, carried out in ten prisons and four probation regions, has gathered valuable insight and learning throughout, including a comprehensive understanding of current practice and identification of gaps and opportunities in service delivery. It has also provided insight relevant to ARNS (Assess, Risks, Needs and Strengths), supporting its development as part of HMPPS’s wider digital transformation strategy. ARNS is designed to modernise offender assessments by moving towards a more dynamic, collaborative, and strength-based approach to resettlement planning, offender management, and risk assessment.
These findings will feed into work to improve the operational processes to support preparation for release, to support delivery of recommendations from the Independent Review of Sentencing.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many full-time equivalent staff in his Department have been employed for the purpose of making social media content in each of the past three years.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
Due to the difficulty of disaggregating the number of staff who are employed to produce social media content from staff who are employed to work on a broader digital communications, it is not possible to report exact figures in response to this question.
Asked by: James McMurdock (Independent - South Basildon and East Thurrock)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data he holds on the reoffending rates of individuals convicted of offences relating to illegal entry into the UK.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
Providing this would incur disproportionate costs.
More broadly the Government is tackling the root causes of reoffending by investing in a range of services which address offenders’ underlying criminogenic needs and support their rehabilitation journey. This includes education, employment, accommodation and access to substance misuse treatment.
Asked by: James McMurdock (Independent - South Basildon and East Thurrock)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what plans he has to publish data on convictions and sentencing outcomes for immigration offences.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data on prosecutions, convictions and sentencing at criminal courts in England and Wales in the Outcomes by Offences data tool. This tool includes convictions and sentencing for immigration offences and can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: Criminal Justice Statistics.
Asked by: Nick Timothy (Conservative - West Suffolk)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will review the statutory time limit of six months for summary offences.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
Proceedings for summary-only offences must be commenced within six months of the date of the offence. The Government is satisfied that that this time limit, as set out in Section 127 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, is an important safeguard which ensures that less serious offences are dealt with promptly. The limit applies to both criminal and civil proceedings, supporting the efficient operation of the courts and maintaining fairness for all parties.
Reviews are done for specific offences and exceptions have been carved out in statute where appropriate, for example for the common assault offence in domestic abuse cases. Where there is a clear need for flexibility, the Government has acted and will continue to act to introduce targeted exceptions, such as recent amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill, which extend the time limit for intimate image abuse. These changes recognise the particular challenges victims face in reporting such offences and ensure that perpetrators can still be brought to justice.
The Government’s Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, published on 18 December 2025, includes a commitment to exploring options to improve access to justice for victims of domestic abuse, including reviewing the time limits for charging domestic abuse-related summary offences.
The Government is confident that the existing legislation clearly outlines when these limits apply. As a result, the Government does not intend to introduce further guidance at this time.
Asked by: Marie Rimmer (Labour - St Helens South and Whiston)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what types of personal and sensitive data were compromised in the April 2025 cyber attack on the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) including whether the breach included information on vulnerable individuals such as victims of domestic abuse and asylum seekers.
Answered by Sarah Sackman - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
We take the security of people’s personal data extremely seriously.
Firstly, to ensure transparency about the cyber- attack and that we reached as many potentially impacted individuals as possible, the Ministry of Justice published a notice shortly after it became aware of the criminal cyber-attack at 08:15 on 19 May on GOV.UK
The notice provided information about the cyber-attack and directed concerned members of the public to the National Cyber Security Centre’s webpage, which contained information on how to protect against the impact of a data breach.
The Legal Aid Agency (LAA) also set up dedicated Customer Services support via a telephone line and email for providers and clients who had concerns regarding the data breach. We did not write to all clients, to all the addresses that we had, because some of those addresses would no longer be current, and that would potentially create another data breach in itself.
The published statement referred to above sets out information about who may have been impacted and the nature of the information which may have been accessed. As far as we are aware, no data has been shared or put out in the public domain. An injunction has been put in place to prohibit sharing of this data. Anyone who does so could be sent to prison. If it is identified that a specific individual is at risk, action will be taken to try to contact them.
In the interests of security, we cannot confirm the method by which unauthorised access was gained to the LAA’s online digital systems or details about specific steps taken or measures implemented to protect LAA systems against any future cyber-attacks.
Security of the new systems has been paramount as we have rebuilt the LAA’s digital systems following the attack. The compromised digital portal has been replaced by a new, secure single sign-in tool for LAA online services (SiLAS). SiLAS has been designed and built in line with UK government and industry best practice for secure development. Security has been included from the ground up, including multi factor authentication, with independent testing activities to validate that the appropriate security controls are in place.
A dedicated team will monitor and update the service to ensure it evolves to remain resilient to emerging threats and is supported by a security operations capability. While no system can be entirely risk free, we are confident that we have taken the right steps to protect the service and its users.
Responsibility for disaster recovery planning for digital systems lies with Justice Digital rather than the LAA. Prior to the cyber- attack there was no digital disaster recovery plan in place. However, had we had a fully funded disaster recovery system, any immediate restoration would have simply restored the systems without resolving the vulnerabilities that enabled the cyber- attack to occur. Justice Digital now have a new Service Owner structure in place where clear Service Standards will be defined and monitored. This will include digital disaster recovery plans for each digital product.
Prior to the cyber- attack the LAA had in place prepared business continuity plans for business-critical processes and services to ensure that access to justice could be maintained in the event of a system outage. These plans were tried and tested, and we were confident that the measures would be effective for our initial response. These measures gave us sufficient time to design and implement longer term measures to meet the specific needs of the incident that were introduced in June 2025.
At every stage, we have acted to protect public access to justice and to support providers in delivering legal aid. We have achieved this without affecting court backlogs or police station activity.
Our business continuity planning was effective in maintaining access to justice from the outset of the attack and the need to have longer term options in place is one of the lessons that we have taken from this incident.
A formal lessons learned approach will systematically analyse lessons from the Ministry of Justice’s and LAA’s preparation for and response to the cyber-attack. This work will cover pre-incident risk management and the response to the incident itself. This will inform future resilience planning, governance improvement and risk mitigation strategies across the Ministry of Justice and its agencies.
Asked by: Pam Cox (Labour - Colchester)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisons and Young Offender Institutions currently have (a) an Incentivised Substance Free Living Unit operating, (b) a Drug Recovery Wing operating, and (c) a Drug Strategy Lead in post.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
HM Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) has funded Incentivised Substance Free Living Units in 85 prisons, and six currently have abstinence-based Drug Recovery Wings. To support delivery of HMPPS’ Drug and Alcohol Strategy, 54 prisons have a dedicated Drug Strategy Lead. All remaining prisons, including Young Offender Institutions, have a designated point of contact for Drug and Alcohol Strategy work.
In addition, HMPPS has recruited 17 Group Drug and Alcohol Leads providing regional leadership, assurance, and co-ordination of drug and alcohol work for all the establishments in their Prison Group. They align activity at establishment level with national drug and alcohol strategy and policies which aim to restrict supply, reduce demand and support recovery. They also support local and regional partnerships with healthcare providers to support a range of issues including continuity of care on release.
Asked by: Pam Cox (Labour - Colchester)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many foreign national offenders were in prison in England and Wales, by offence group as of 30 September 2025.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
A breakdown of Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) by offence group is published in the Annual prison population statistics and the most recent publication can be found here: prison-population-2025.ods. Please see Table_1_A_26, which shows the breakdown as of 30 June 2025.
As these statistics are published annually, we are not able to provide a breakdown as of September.
In the last year, we removed over 2,700 FNOs under the Early Removal Scheme, that is more than the number removed in the previous year, and a 74 percent increase compared to the same period in 2023. It will free up much-needed space in our prisons.
Asked by: Al Pinkerton (Liberal Democrat - Surrey Heath)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to improve prisoner rehabilitation in (a) Surrey and (b) Surrey Heath constituency.
Answered by Jake Richards - Assistant Whip
HM Prison and Probation Service rehabilitation services take many forms, ranging from accredited programmes and interventions that are aimed at giving people skills to change their attitudes, thinking and behaviour, to enabling a person to access education, healthcare, substance misuse support, suitable accommodation, and the means to earn a living pro-socially.
Some rehabilitative activity is delivered in-house, and some via our partner organisations. We keep our work under constant review to ensure we are acting in line with the available evidence whilst also meeting the rehabilitative needs of the people we work with.