Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to improve the welfare of staff working in the prisons system.

By the nature of their roles, staff working in the prison system can come into contact with some of the most challenging and dangerous people in society and it is essential that they are supported to carry out their important roles. Given these challenges, we provide extensive mental health support, including a 24-hour helpline, confidential counselling, and online wellbeing services. Our Trauma Risk Management practitioners and Care Teams provide further support following any incidents while on duty.

The Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) offers confidential 24/7 telephone helpline for counselling and provides a range of wellbeing and health promotion workshops. EAP also delivers reflective sessions which are a proactive mental ill health preventative intervention. The sessions focus on the impact of traumatic events at work, helping employees to develop coping strategies and preventing an adverse impact on their professional and private life.

Within prisons, we are in early stages of implementing the Enable Programme, which aims to transform prisons over the medium term, through a series of workforce and regime changes that will change how HMPPS trains, develops, leads and supports prison staff to ensure that they feel safe, supported, valued and confident in their skills and their ability to make a difference.

We are investing around £15 million in protective equipment to help keep frontline staff working in prisons safe, including expanding the use of tasers and providing more protective body armour. This investment will include provision of up to 10,000 more units of protective body armour (known as stab-proof vests) to staff for use when it is deemed as necessary, and training up to 500 more officers to use Conductive Energy Devices (known as Tasers). This means that they will be able to provide immediate intervention during certain high-threat, serious incidents.