Malcolm Moss (North East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many prisoners serving sentences in HM prisons are beyond their original or adjusted tariff; how many of those maintain innocence of the crime of which they were convicted; what the (a) original and (b) adjusted tariff is in each case; and how long each such prisoner has been detained to date.

David Hanson (Minister of State, Ministry of Justice; Delyn, Labour)

On 24 November 2008, there were 3,949 indeterminate sentenced prisoners in custody recorded as being beyond their original or adjusted tariff.

These figures are taken from the Public Protection Unit Database (PPUD) within the National Offender Management Service. As with any large scale recording system, it is subject to possible errors arising from either data entry or processing.

No central record of prisoners maintaining their innocence is maintained. To establish how many post-tariff indeterminate sentenced prisoners continued to maintain their innocence and how long each such prisoner had been detained to date would require a manual checking of individual records, which could be carried out only at disproportionate cost.