Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether he plans to develop a national workforce strategy for the prison workforce.

The Government recognises the importance of the prison workforce to delivering safe, secure and rehabilitative prison regimes. Whilst we do not have a formal prison workforce strategy, we have strong existing internal workforce planning processes that inform our strategic approach to recruitment, retention, capability and our resourcing models. Internally, there is a HMPPS People Strategy which sets out our approach to building and sustaining the workforce required to deliver prison and probation services, focused on recruiting and retaining great people, strengthening capability and productivity, supporting staff wellbeing, embedding high professional standards and developing strong leaders.

Our current priority is stabilisation of the workforce, but we continue to embed good practice across the prison workforce, including learning best practice from, and working with, other government departments. We are working to improve the efficiency of national recruitment pipelines and targeting interventions where they are most needed.

This includes taking an evidence-led approach to tackling the causes of attrition through insights from an exit interview process and developing interventions such as the Careers Pathway Framework. We are also strengthening learning and development through the Enable programme which will transform Prison Officer Foundation Training into a 12-month learning journey, combining structured learning with sustained workplace experience to better equip new officers with the skills, confidence and professional judgement they need to operate safely and effectively.

To ensure that staffing budgets across the prison estate are aligned to our agreed delivery priorities, and that we have a clear and transparent staffing position, a new prisons staffing resource model has been created during three years of extensive engagement and research, to provide a standardised baseline for target staffing of directly employed staff within adult public sector prisons.