Question to the Ministry of Justice:

What progress his Department has made on tackling mobile phone use in prisons.

Our strategy to tackling the security threat posed by mobile phones is threefold:

• we must prevent them from getting into our prisons in the first place by expanding airport-style security, including metal detectors and X-ray scanners;
• we must find and stop those phones from working through using portable detection poles and the latest detection and signal-blocking technologies;
• we must also exploit the data held on those phones. We have delivered new kits at 30 prisons to allow staff to download data from illicit phones quickly.