Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison guards left service in the high security estate in each year since 2010.

The quarterly HMPPS workforce statistics publication covers staffing information, including leavers, and the latest publication covers data up to 31 March 2024.

Data relating to the number of prison officers who left service in the high security estate, broken down by calendar year, since 2010, has been provided in table 1 below.

In 2021 a new standardised exit interview process was introduced across HMPPS (both prisons and probation) to allow staff the opportunity to convey their reasons for leaving. This, coupled with dedicated retention research has enabled leaver trend data to be analysed. Feedback from the exit interviews helps to shape and determine interventions to better understand and respond to staff attrition. Since April 2022, we have invested in several new initiatives to improve the experience of our new joiners and increase retention of our employees.

These include:

• a new peer-to-peer learning scheme
• the introduction of New Colleague Mentors for all staff
• the Career Pathways Framework

Retention is improving across HMPPS, with prison officer resignation rate dropping to 8.4% as of March 2024, an improvement of 1.4 percentage points on the previous year.

Table 1: Number of prison officers¹ across public sector prisons² who left HMPPS³ from the high security estate⁴, broken down by calendar year, from 01 January 2010 - 31 December 2023^(p)

(headcount)

Notes to table 1:

1. "Prison officers" refers to staff in the following grades: Band 3-4 / Prison Officer (incl specialists), Band 4 / Supervising Officer and Band 5 / Custodial Managers working in HM Prison Service or the Youth Custody Service (YCS), in England and Wales. Therefore, it excludes staff working in HQ or the Probation Service

2. Only information for public sector prisons in England and Wales. Information for private prisons is not included in this table

3. As with all HR databases, extracts are taken at a fixed point in time, to ensure consistency of reporting. However, the database itself is dynamic and where updates to the database are made late, subsequent to the taking of the extract, these updates will not be reflected in figures produced by the extract. For this reason, HR data are unlikely to be precisely accurate

4. The "high security estate" refers to the 'Long term & High Security' group in public sector prisons in England and Wales. The "high security estate" categorisation is reflective as at 31 March 2024.

(p) Provisional data. There may be minor changes to figures in future due to additional data being recorded on the reporting system.