To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what his Department’s estimate is of the effect on the prison population of reversing the presumption in favour of bail in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. (155504)

It is not possible to make a precise calculation for full implementation of the provisions for reversing the presumption in favour of bail in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 because of the limited data held centrally and because significant assumptions have to be made about the characteristics of the cases affected.

We are pursuing a carefully phased implementation taking account of prison capacity, starting with the most serious offences.