Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers (a) were recruited to and (b) left the Prison Service in each month since January 2014.

Information on the number of band 3 to 5 prison officers that were recruited to the Prison Service in each month since January 2014 is shown in the table below. The recruitment figures include existing National Offender Management Service staff of other grades who become officers during the period.

Table: Prison Officer joiners and leavers to the Prison Service by month, January 2014 to March 2015

All figures are rounded to the nearest 10, with numbers ending in 5 rounded to the nearest multiple of 20 to prevent systematic bias. As with all HR databases, extracts are taken at a fixed point in time, to ensure consistency of reporting. The database itself is dynamic however, and where updates to the database are made 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, and to present unrounded figures would be to overstate the accuracy of the figures. Rounding to 10 accurately depicts the level of certainty that is held with these figures.