Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will list the ten prisons which currently have the highest proportion of prison officers off sick and unable to come to work.

The quarterly HMPPS workforce statistics publication covers staffing information, including the working days lost due to sickness absence. The latest publication covers data for the period up to 30 September 2022.

Therefore, the latest data available to provide a ‘current’ proportion of sick absence is for 30 September 2022.

The ten prisons which had the highest proportion of band 3-5 officers who took time off sick on 30 September 2022 is shown in table 1 below.

Table 1: Snaphot of top 10 prisons with highest proportion of band 3-5 officers1 off sick on 30 September 20222(p)

1. Includes Band 3-4 / Prison Officer (incl specialists), Band 4 / Supervising Officer and Band 5 / Custodial Managers.

2. Includes staff who either had sick end date on or after 30 September 2022 or did not have a sick end date at all, as at time of data being produced for September 2022 HMPP workforce publication

(p) Figures relating to current financial year are provisional

In the 12 months to 30 September 2022, band 3-5 officers lost an average of 17.3 workings days. This is an increase from 16.6 working days compared to the 12 months to 31 March 2022. Trends from 2017 are shown below.

Table 2: Band 3-5 officer sickness, 12 months to 31 March 2017 to 12 months to 30 September 2022

1. Average working days lost per member of staff is calculated as number of working days lost to sickness divided by the average number of full time equivalent staff for a year.