Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an estimate of (a) the number and (b) the job roles of HM Prisons staff who took their own lives in each of the last five years.

Her Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) is committed to ensuring the health, safety and wellbeing of its dedicated public servants.

The department offers staff support through its Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), which includes a 24-hour confidential helpline. Additionally, there is access to mental health support including wellbeing workshops, confidential counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapies where clinically appropriate. These services can be accessed by employees absent or at work and employees do not have to inform their manager before accessing confidential counselling.

In addition, staff are able to access preventative mental health support in the form of Reflective Sessions where they can discuss with a qualified counsellor the effects of work on life and life on work. These sessions are available to all HMPPS staff via the EAP supplier.

The information requested is not held by the Ministry of Justice. MoJ’s Shared Operating Platform (SOP) which is used for HR payroll does not have a record of the cause of Death for its deceased employees.

Recording a Death in Service as suicide is not something MoJ staff are able to do as the cause of death is not determined immediately after a Death in Service, but many months or sometimes years later by a Coroner. Coroner’s data is not then retrospectively added to SOP, but is published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).