Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers were signed off work for mental health reasons in (a) publicly-managed and (b) privately-managed prisons in each of the last 10 years.

HMPPS is committed to ensuring the health, safety and wellbeing of its staff in England and Wales, with all staff having access to a comprehensive occupational health service and employee assistance programme.

The number of prison officers who were signed off work for mental health reasons in publicly-managed prison are shown in the Table 1 below.

Table 1: HMPPS band 3-5 prison officers¹ who were signed off sick due to Mental and Behavioural Disorders² in public sector prisons, 2009/10 to 2018/19

1. Includes Band 3-4 / Prison Officer (incl. specialists), Band 4 / Supervising Officer and Band 5 / Custodial Managers.
2. Absences are categorised according to International Classification of Diseases, which is an approach used across the civil service.

While the figures show an increase in the number of individuals, the figures in 2010 represent 5.7% of the workforce and in 2019 it represents 8.5% of the workforce.

We do not collect this information for privately managed prisons, as there is no contractual requirement for us to do so. All staffing matters in privately managed prisons, including the responsibility of ensuring the availability of sufficiently trained and experienced staff to maintain safe and decent prisons, lies with contractors.