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<p>The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate remains that over the course
of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or
going to prison. This estimate is based on 2009 survey data.</p><p>The Prison Strategy
White paper detailed our intention to work with other government departments to commission
updated research to improve our collective understanding of the overall number of
children affected by parental incarceration.</p><p>As part of this work, changes have
been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) to enable us to collect data
on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children
under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment, which means that we can access
this information centrally. Questions contained within the BCST are under continuous
review to reflect learning from operational colleagues and people with lived experience
of prison. While the BCST does include questions on the sex and ages of dependents
of prisoners, the collection of this information relies solely on self-declaration
of the parent in prison and therefore may raise challenges as to the accuracy or consistency
of this information without being able to verify with other sources.</p><p>The Government
is delivering on its white paper commitment to improve our data and evidence in this
area, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a
£19.7m cross government Shared Outcomes Fund programme which is linking data to enable
better evidenced and more joined up cross government services. The purpose of BOLD
is to identify the overall scale of the issue by improving our understanding of the
number of children affected by parental imprisonment. The BOLD programme aims to do
this by exploring data available across government, including information that does
not rely on self-disclosure. We expect findings from the project to be published in
Spring 2024.</p>
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