There are no up-to-date statistics on how many prisoners re-offend after they are released.

Lawrie Hooper (LibVannin, Ramsey), tabled a House of Keys question for written answer by Home Affairs Minister Bill Malarkey, seeking the percentages of prisoners who re-offended in each of the past five years.

The nearest figure of any kind that Mr Malarkey could give dated back to 2012-13, when nearly a quarter of people convicted were repeat offenders.

In his response to Mr Hooper, Mr Malarkey said: ’The provision of accurate statistics on reoffending rates is a very complex matter, as there is currently a gulf in unambiguously identifying individuals who serve a prison sentence (prison data) and those who are prosecuted for offences (police data).

’This is further complicated by the occasions when the person convicted of an offence is subsequently incarcerated for a different, related offence.

’Some work has been done in the past to measure reoffending but pressure on police resources has made it difficult to progress this undertaking.’

He said improvements to records systems, expected under the government’s digital strategy’, would ’provide an opportunity to measure reoffending on an ongoing basis’.

The only figures Mr Malarkey could produce came from an answer to a Tynwald question, given by his predecessor, Juan Watterson.

Those showed that in 2012-13, there were 1,319 people convicted of an offence, of whom 323 had previous convictions - a repeat offending rate of 24.4 per cent.

The highest rate in the preceding five years was in 2007-8, which was 27 per cent (457 repeat offenders out of 1,695 people convicted).