Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the prison population was, by prison, on 19 March 2014; how many prisoners each prison was built for; and how many foreign national prisoners there are in each prison, by country.

Individual prison population and capacity information is published monthly on the Ministry of justice website at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prison-population-figures-2014

This data is produced on the last working Friday of each month and therefore the information published is from the last working Friday in February (28^th) and not on 19 March as requested.

The attached table identifies the number of declared foreign national offenders in each prison, by nationality, as at 31 December 2013. This is in line with the latest published figures.

These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems, which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible error(s) with data entry and processing.

All Foreign National Offenders sentenced to custody are referred to the Home Office for them to consider deportation at the earliest possible opportunity.

Reducing the FNO population is a top priority for this Government. We are working hard to reduce the flow of FNOs into our prison system and increase the number of FNOs removed from the UK through Prisoner Transfer Agreements (PTAs); the Early Removal Scheme (ERS) and Tariff Expired Removal Scheme (TERS).