Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) offender-on-offender and (b) offender-on-staff assaults have taken place on the secure estate in each of the last 10 financial years.

The number of prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and assaults on staff for the financial year are shown in the summary tables of the Safety in Custody publication to March 2024: Safety in custody: quarterly update to March 2024 - GOV.UK Specifically, table 4 in the summary tables for this release gives these figures.

Please note that:

1. Figures from April 2018 onwards exclude incidents occurring within the youth estate, so figures for 2018 are not comparable with the years before or after, due to youth estate incidents being included in part of the year, from January to April 2018. The youth estate includes incidents occurring within Cookham Wood, Werrington and Wetherby, as well as the youth wing at Feltham and Parc. Prior to April 2018 these figures were collected via manual returns, so it is not possible to split out all youth estate incidents up to March 2018. Figures for incidents occurring within the youth estate are published within the ‘Safety in the children and young people secure estate’ statistics bulletin via the following link - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/announcements/safety-in-the-youth-secure-estate-bulletin.

2. Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults are a subset of all assault incidents.

3. Assaults on staff are a subset of all assault incidents. Some assault incidents may be recorded as both a prisoner-on-prisoner assault and an assault on staff, so the sum of the two categories may exceed the total number of assaults.

4. The figures for assaults on staff include all incidents where a member of staff was assaulted, which can include a small number of incidents where the assault was by someone other than a prisoner.