Prison Population and Crime Projections (Hansard, 18 July 2000)

§ Lord Bassam of Brighton

The Research Development and Statistics Directorate of the Home Office provided revised projections of the prison population in England and Wales in May, and a summary of the projection is included in the April 2000Prison Population Brief, which is available on the Internet at http://www/homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/index.htm.

Projections are provided according to various alternative scenarios. The middle variant projection assumes some growth in the use of custody in the courts, but no change in sentence lengths. The higher variant projection assumes that sentence lengths continue to increase. These scenarios both assume that the amount of courts' business remains constant over the period. A lower variant projection assumes sentence lengths and custody rates do not increase further and continue at the levels prevailing in March 2000, leading to a prison population of 66,700 in 2005. Projections take into account known legislative and policy changes. Table 1 gives the results for the middle and higher variants.

The available projections on recorded crime cover property crime trends and were published in autumn 1999 as Home Office Research Study 198, Modelling and predicting property crime trends in England and Wales.

Property crime (burglary and theft) comprises around 60 per cent of all recorded crime. The models provide projections of burglary and theft based on expected movements in the number of young males, the stock of goods and consumer spending. These are not forecasts, which would incorporate a range of other information and judgments about how other social, economic and policy changes might effect the level of crime. The projections are given in Table 2.

Table 1: Long term projections of prisoners to 2005, England and Wales (May 2000).
	Middle Variant	Year-on year increases	Higher variant	Year-on year increase
1998	64,800^*	—	64,800^*	—
2000	65,200	+0.6%	65,400	+0.9%
2001	66,700	+2.3%	68,000	+4.0%
2002	68,300	+2.3%	70,300	+3.4%
2003	69,400	+1.6%	71,500	+1.8%
2004	70,500	+1.6%	73,300	+2.5%
2005	71,600	+1.6%	75,200	+2.6%
^*Actual

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Table 2: Projections of recorded burglary and theft.
Year	Projected number of recorded burglaries (millions)	Year-on-year increase in burglary	Projected number of recorded thefts (millions)	Year-on-year increase in theft
1997	^*1.02	—	^*2.17	—
1998	^*0.97	-5%	^*2.14	-1%
1999	1.02	+6%	2.33	+9%
2000	1.14	+11%	2.65	+14%
2001	1.28	+12%	3.05	+15%
^*Actual recorded crimes

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Our judgment is that the level of theft will not rise as far as the central projection (perhaps rising to 2.8 million by 2001). We expect burglary to remain close to the central projection in Table 2.

Projections have not been made past 2001 because of the lack of reliable data on the variables in the models, and because uncertainty over the projections increases over projection periods.