Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many workshop placements were delivered in prisons for (a) women and (b) men in each of the last three years.

NOMS uses a specific definition of 'workshop' which is only used for commercial and industrial scale work and specific work activities.[1] These figures do not include the substantial number of prisoners in otherlearning, vocational training or work opportunities within prison on tasks such as cooking, serving meals, maintenance and cleaning which can help them find a job on release and support their rehabilitation. The figures also exclude work placements undertaken by offenders on release from prison on temporary licence.

The average number of prisoners reported as undertaking specific work activities1 at any one time across male and female public sector prisons in England and Wales in each of the last three years is set out in Table 1 below. Equivalent figures for contracted-out prisons are only available for 2014/15 and are shown in Table 2.

Table 1

Table 2

Work in prisons continues to grow steadily, up from 10.6 million working hours in 10/11 to 14.9 million working hours in the year 14/15. Our key focus remains on ensuring that we grow work – particularly from other Government Departments. That is why we want to reform the prison estate, building nine new prisons with better facilities for training and rehabilitation.

[1] Including Enterprise/Contract Services, Engineering, Aluminium, Laundry, Newgate Furniture, Concrete, Plastics, Textiles, Woodwork, Food Packing, Commercial Land Based Activities, Braille, Charity, Printing, Data Entry, Signs, Desk Top Publishing, Retail, External Recycling and other workshops.

[2] For 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 the figures include estimated adjustments to take account of changes introduced following a review in 2014 to re-categorise some types of activities, such as non-commercial Land Based Activities. For the above tables further estimates have been made of the relative proportion of commercial to non-commercial Land Based Activities in female prisons where this is unknown.

[3] Data relating to public sector prisons is sourced from administrative IT monitoring systems used by them to record the number of prisoners in each of their workshops. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the level of detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. The number of prisoners working refers to the average number of prisoners working in the defined activities across the prison estate at a particular time as is not a cumulative figure.

[4] Contracted-out prisons have no contractual obligation to provide NOMS with the number of prisoners working. They have provided this information for 2014/15, but no information on the number of prisoners working is available for previous years.