Commentary on Sections Period for which notification requirements apply Section 53 – Period for which notification requirements apply
139.Section 53 sets out the period during which a person will be subject to the notification requirements. The notification period for those aged 18 or over on the date of conviction for the triggering offence is: 30 years for those sentenced to 10 or more years’ imprisonment or detention (including life or indeterminate sentences); 15 years for those sentenced to 5 or more years’ but less than 10 years’ imprisonment or detention; and 10 years in any other case, which includes adults sentenced to 12 months’ or more but less than 5 years’ imprisonment or detention, persons made subject to a hospital order and persons aged 16 or 17 on the date of their conviction (regardless of the sentence they are given).
140.The notification period starts with the day on which the person is dealt with for the offence (subsection (4)). However, subsection (7) provides that in determining whether the notification period has expired, any time the individual has spent in custody by order of a court, serving a sentence of imprisonment or detention, or detained in hospital or under the Immigration Acts shall be discounted. This means for example that where a person whose sentence attracts a notification period of 10 years goes to prison immediately following sentence, the 10 years will in effect run from the date the person is released.
141.Subsection (5) describes how the notification period operates in respect of a person who has been found to be under a disability but who is subsequently tried for the offence.
142.Subsection (6) specifies how to calculate the notification period where a person is sentenced for more than one terrorist-related offence and these sentences are terms of imprisonment running consecutively or partly concurrently. Where the terms are consecutive, they are to be added together. For example, where a person is sentenced to 4 years’ imprisonment for one terrorist-related offence and 10 years’ imprisonment for another such offence, to run consecutively, the sentence would be treated as 14 years’ imprisonment for the purposes of working out the notification period (in this case, 30 years). Terms will be partly concurrent when they are imposed on different occasions. An example would be where a person is sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment for a terrorist-related offence, and 6 months into this term the person is sentenced to 4 years’ imprisonment for a second such offence. Where this is the case, the notification period is based on the combined length of the terms minus any overlapping period. In the example given, the combined length of the sentences would be 6 years and the overlapping period would be the remaining 18 months of the 2-year sentence. So the sentence for the purposes of working out the notification period would be four and a half years (resulting in a 10 year notification period).