Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers were on restricted duties at HMP Wandsworth on the first Monday of each month in each of the last 12 months.

The requested information is shown in the table below.

Number of Prison Officers on restricted duties at HMP Wandsworth, Mar 2023 – Feb 2024

Restricted duties are where a member of staff is limited from their regular duties (this can be with regards to tasks or time), due to injury, illness or other reason, applied at the discretion of the line manager.

To ensure we support staff welfare, we have in place an Occupational Health and Employee Assistance Programme to improve wellbeing, as well as Care Teams, who are trained to provide support to any member of staff involved in an incident within the prison or when conducting official duties, present in all public sector prisons. Other services available include reflective sessions, access to online wellbeing services, 24-hour counselling, and a trauma-focused peer support system.

Alongside schemes to improve welfare, we continue to take steps to ensure that all prisons are sufficiently resourced through focusing efforts on recruitment, seeking to bolster our applicant pipelines through our use of incentives scheme to target prisons where there is the greatest need.

Despite a challenging labour market, the Ministry of Justice has seen an improving national staffing picture within prisons. The number of frontline (Band 3-5) prison officers increased by 1,634 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) (7.6 per cent) in the year to December 2023, to 23,266 FTE. Over the same period, there was a fall in the resignation rate among Band 3-5 officers of 2.4 percentage points.