First Grant of Temporary Release (FGTR) application statistics : FOI release

Information requested

You asked for the following in regards to the LSCMI Application:

1. Of the First Grant of Temporary Release applications for life prisoners approved by Scottish Ministers whether any of these applications related to the 1,032 closed cases who were wrongly risk assessed by the LS/CMI system. Please provide this information for all applications approved by Scottish Ministers since 21 November 2014.

2. Of the 1,032 wrongly assessed closed cases, how many were approved for early release from their prison sentence by the Parole Board. Please provide this information for all applications approved by Scottish Ministers since 21 November 2014.

3. Of the 285 open cases which were wrongly risk assessed, the breakdown of this number by types of prisoner. By types of prisoner I mean remand prisoner, convicted prisoners awaiting sentence, short term prisoner, long-term prisoner and life prisoner. Please provide this information for the current prison status of each offender. For example, I am not asking for the historical information associated with these open cases but the current prison status of each of these cases as of 7 March 2022.

Response

The Scottish Government can provide you with the following information in response to your requests:

1. This was answered by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans, Keith Brown, when he appeared at the Criminal Justice Committee on 9th March 2022 . To clarify the 1, 032 cases you refer to were not all wrongly assessed, that is the number identified as potentially affected by the scoring issue. The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) identified 8 First Grant of Temporary Release (FGTR) cases to be checked within the open and closed cases, and found no public protection issues with any of these. 7 of these individuals are in custody and one has been on licence since 2019. Before Scottish Ministers consider an FGTR application, the SPS undertakes a comprehensive assurance process, reviewing the application from the relevant multidisciplinary Risk Management Team (RMT) against a clear set of standards and guidelines to ensure decisions are accurately recorded and founded on appropriate evidence.

2. The cases you refer to are cases that were not all wrongly assessed but had the potential to be affected by the scoring issue. In addition to the initial public protection checks that have been made, these cases will be fully reviewed individually by the Risk Management Authority led review group and their finding will be reported to the Scottish Parliament. To further clarify if an individual was sentenced to more than a year in prison or over 6 months for a sexual offence, they may be on licence. There are a number of strict mandatory conditions to follow if you have been released on license which includes reporting to a probation officer daily, committing no further crimes, living at an approved address and not leaving the UK.

3. To clarify again the cases you refer to were cases that were potentially effected by the scoring issues. As per the answers above these cases have now been checked and no public protection risk identified. Of the 285 cases you refer to not all will be related to those within custody, some will be within the community. Any further breakdown will be available as part of the Risk Management Authority led review of all these cases and will be reported to the Scottish Parliament when available.

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