Personal Independence Payment: Appeals

(asked on )

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, which prisons have libraries; and which organisations (a) run and (b) fund each such library.


Answered by
Jeremy Wright Portrait
Jeremy Wright
This question was answered on 14th May 2014

The Prison Service has always recognised the importance of reading and literature in the rehabilitative process, and the positive effects these have on prisoners. Every prison has a library, which is available to all prisoners to ensure they have access to books and other material for education and training purposes.

The attached table shows the organisations that provide and fund library services in each prison. The table also shows the available information in relation to the allocated budget for prison library services over the past four years, broken down by prison and in total.

In the case of Wealstun and Isis, the reduction in spending is due to initial set up costs in previous financial years.

For prisons in Wales, the reduction in spend is due to the change of stock rotation that were implemented in 2011 in line with Welsh library service standards. Learning and skills managers re-negotiated the capitation funds and this resulted in a reduction in cost but not a reduction in opening hours or quality of material provided.

In respect of privately-managed prisons, contracts awarded before 2011 include library provision as part of the overall custodial service. The breakdown of these contract costs is commercially confidential, and is therefore not available and is not shown in the overall total. Prison contracts awarded since 2011 do have identified levels of funding for prison libraries and these are shown in the table.

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