Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many operational prison officers there were on (a) 12 May 2010, (b) 4 September 2012, (c) 9 May 2015 and (d) 14 July 2016.

Information on the NOMS workforce is published quarterly at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-offender-management-service-workforce-statistics.

We will always ensure prisons have safe staffing levels. In the 15 months to March 2016 we recruited 2340 prison officers nationally - a net increase of 540 officers.