Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) prison officers, (b) prison governors and (c) other members of staff were assaulted in the course of their work in each of the last four years.

Violence in prisons is not tolerated and assaults on our hardworking staff are unacceptable. We do not underestimate the hard work and challenges that prison staff face on a daily basis which is why we have been working extremely closely with the police and CPS to tackle this issue. A new joint protocol produced by the Prison Service, Crown Prosecution Service and Association of Chief Police Officers will set out that when there are serious assaults on prison staff, the perpetrators will be prosecuted unless there is a good reason why not.

The number of assaults on staff is published in the Safety in Custody Bulletin available at this link: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/safety-in-custody-statistics. Table 3.1 provides the total number of staff assaults whereas the number of prisoner on officer assaults can be found in table 3.8 of the annual tables.

With the exception of prison officers assaulted during “prisoner on officer” assaults, the role of the staff member involved is not recorded and so any staff members that are assaulted in other types of assault incident cannot be identified by their specific role. The incident reporting system does not record detailed information about staff members that are assaulted and so we are not able to provide the requested breakdown. Whilst this information is not held centrally assaults on staff are taken very seriously and as such are recorded and managed locally.