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Compulsorily Detained Psychiatric Patients

Answer

Under sections 47/49 of the Mental Health Act 1983, the Secretary of State may authorise by warrant the transfer of sentenced prisoners to a mental health hospital, where he is satisfied that the criteria for detention are met by the aforementioned Act. Thereby, and for the duration of the period in hospital, the transferred prisoner becomes what is known as a restricted patient.

The requested data in the tables below are taken from an electronic casework system. Snapshot data of restricted patients in hospital are available only at the end of each year. We have provided this information in Table 1 for 2019-2022. We are unable to recreate snapshot data, for the start of each of the last 20 quarters, due to limitations of the case management system.

Table 1: Population of offenders serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) detained in hospital as a restricted patient on 31 December in each year from 2019-2023.

Year	Population of IPP Restricted Patients
2019	272
2020	276
2021	292
2022	262
2023	241

Table 2: The number of offenders serving an IPP sentence who have been transferred from prison to secure hospitals on mental health grounds in each year since 2020.

Year	Number of transfers
2020	56
2021	41
2022	44
2023	37

Notes

1. These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large-scale recording systems are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.
2. Where patients are admitted more than once, each admission is counted separately. This information does not count number of individual patients but instances of transfers.

Data Source: Public Protection Unit Database (PPUD)

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

24924

Session

2023-24

Grouped for answer

Yes

Subjects

Compulsorily detained psychiatric patients Prison sentences

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk