Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average weekly time out of cell for prisoners in HMP Wandsworth has been for each week in 2024.

Prison governors set a regime for each day specifying when prisoners will ordinarily be unlocked. There will be occasions, however, where certain prisoners will remain in their cell during these times. Reasons for this will include illness, the management of operational incidents, and other operational reasons such as staff needing to be deployed to other duties. There will also be occasions where prisoners will be out of cell at times when they are scheduled to be locked in, for example to attend medical appointments at hospital, a late arrival from court, or a transfer between prisons.

To accurately record the amount of time prisoners spend out of cell, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service would therefore be required to record information for each individual prisoner, taking into account their unique movements on a daily basis.

There is no central mandate which governs the amount of time that prisoners should spend out of their cells. Governors are instead afforded the flexibility to deliver balanced regimes that maintain an appropriate level of time out of cell on a range of activities, including association, which meet the needs of the establishment’s population.