Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers have been (a) investigated, (b) disciplined and (c) dismissed for illicit relationships with inmates in each year since 2020, broken down by sex.

We only hold data on cases where staff were recommended for dismissal, as individuals may choose to resign before a dismissal can be formally enacted. As a result, we have used this field to respond to the question to avoid undercounting the number of people involved. This data can be found in the following tables.

Table 1: Band 3-5 prison officers(1) investigated(2) due to an allegation of 'Inappropriate Relationship with a Prisoner / Ex-Prisoner'

Table 2: Band 3-5 prison officers facing a conduct and discipline(3), (4)charge of 'Inappropriate Relationship with a Prisoner / Ex-Prisoner'

Table 3: Band 3-5 prison officers recommended for dismissal following a conduct and discipline(3) charge of 'Inappropriate Relationship with a Prisoner / Ex-Prisoner'

Notes to tables:

1. Band 3-5 Officers includes Bands 3-4 / Prison Officers (incl specialists), Band 4 / Supervising Officers, and Band 5 / Custodial Managers.

2.    Staff subject to at least one investigation that was concluded during the relevant year.

3.    Conduct and discipline cases are defined as where a penalty has been imposed on a member of HMPPS staff for a reason of conduct.

4.    Staff with at least one conduct and discipline case concluded during the year. Equally staff involved in more than one case during the year are counted only once.

5.    Allegations which meet a criminal threshold will be referred to the Police for investigation. If a criminal justice outcome is secured, this will result in a summary dismissal as per PSI 10/2016 Conduct and Discipline and will not be recorded against a specific ‘type’ of misconduct in the Conduct and Discipline data,

6.    Years run from 1st April to 31st March.

7.    In terms of the Gender data presented, the MoJ HR system holds demographic data on staff.  In the HR system there is a database field called Gender. The Gender field can only be one of two options – male or female. It is filled in for all staff when new staff records are created using details to confirm identity (i.e. name, date of birth, address) from official documentation supplied by the successful job applicant. However, it is possible for this information to be updated in line with departmental policy. The Office for Statistics Regulation recognises that this is an evolving area both for society and statistics, so advice and guidance is likely to change over time.

~ denotes suppressed values of 2 or fewer or other values which would allow values of 2 or fewer to be derived by subtraction. Low numbers are suppressed to prevent disclosure in accordance with the Data Protection Act, 2018.

Additional Note:

As with all HR databases, extracts are taken at a fixed point in time, to ensure consistency of reporting. However the database itself is dynamic, and where updates to the database are made late, subsequent to the taking of the extract, these updates will not be reflected in figures produced by the extract. For this reason, HR data are unlikely to be precisely accurate.