Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what was the maximum number of full-time prison officers working at Wandsworth prison in each year since 2010.

The quarterly HMPPS workforce statistics publication covers staffing information. The latest publication covers data for up to the period 30 June 2023.

Despite a challenging labour market, the 12 months ending 30 June 2023 saw an increase of over 700 Full Time Equivalent Band prison officers. This means we now have 4,000 more prison officers than in March 2017. We are also recruiting 5,000 prison officers across public and private prisons by the mid-2020s. Over the past six years, from March 2017 to March 2023, staffing levels at HMP Wandsworth have increased by 24 per cent, on the basis of Full Time Equivalent (FTE).

We recently increased the pay of the vast majority of frontline officers by 7 per cent. Combined with other pay rises, this means starting pay for prison officers has increased since 2019/20 from £22,293 to £30,902 (on the basis of a 37-hour week at the national rate, with unsocial hours) or £23,529 to £32,851 (on the basis of a 39-hour week at the national rate, with unsocial hours). The latest Prison Service Pay Review Body (PSPRB) report, the recommendations of which were all accepted, can be found here PSPRB Report - 2023.

When a prison has vacancies, staffing levels are routinely supplemented, for instance by using Payment Plus, which is a form of overtime not accounted for in the data provided here. Use of detached duty, a long-standing mechanism to deploy staff from one prison to support another, is also not included in this data.

Table 1 sets out the number of staff at HMP Wandsworth relative to the number of prisoners for the years for which data is available.

Table 1: The average ratio of HMPPS payroll staff to prisoners at HMP Wandsworth for the 12 months to the end of June 2023 and the previous six years is shown in the table below. The prison population data is publicly available back to September 2015 so the earliest 12-month average June figure is for 2017.