Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many closed prisons are owned by his Department; and how much his Department has spent on (a) utility and (b) other maintenance costs for closed prisons in each of the last five years.

The Ministry of Justice owns four closed prisons.

In each of the last five years, utility costs for the Department were:

2017/18 - £278,159.55

2018/19 - £231,913.92

2019/20 - £306,616.57

2020/21 - £248,107.64

2021/22 - £103,774.57

Other maintenance costs over those same years were:

2017/18 – £16,039.74

2018/19 – £44,684.70

2019-20 – £51,719.08

2020/21 – £39,403.36

2021/22 – £28,664.63

We have successfully sold a number of closed sites and vastly reduced the cost to the taxpayer. This decline in utility costs is down to HMPPS successfully offloading surplus properties and the utilities at sites which are ‘closed’ for development (such as Glen Parva and Wellingborough) becoming the responsibility of developers during works.