Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of prison staff (a) in administrative grades or (b) employed as instructional officers are currently (i) working remotely, (ii) shielding, or (iii) attending prison establishments, by grade; and if he will make a statement.

The vast majority of operational staff in prisons continue to attend the workplace – for these staff we are providing Personal Protective Equipment where appropriate.

We are unable to provide data on the total number of prison staff working remotely as this data is collected by exception. However, we are able to provide the number of staff who are working from home and are unable fulfil all of their usual duties outside of their usual place of work for Covid-19 related reasons. We are also able to provide what data we do have as a proportion of our overall headcount of staff.

Of those, and as of 12 June, the number and proportion of public sector prison staff in administrative grades and employed as instructional officers working remotely or not working are as below:

We do not hold information centrally on the number and proportion of prison staff who are shielding.

Data Sources & Quality

Source: HMPPS COVID-19 absences data collection

The symbol ~ denotes suppressed values of 3 or fewer (and totals that would allow values of 3 or fewer to be calculated) to avoid the risk of identifying individuals.

Excludes staff who have been reported absent from work but it is not clear if the staff member continues to work remotely or not.

These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS COVID-19 data collection. Care is taken when processing and analysing returns but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level. This data has been self-reported and has not yet been checked against our central databases