Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison staff have (a) been taken to and (b) required ventilation in hospital as a result of covid-19.

As of 31 August 2020, 68 prison staff had either been taken to hospital following a reported diagnosis of Covid-19 or had subsequently tested positive for COVID-19 in hospital.

This number includes staff not directly employed by HMPPS but who work within the prison such as healthcare and maintenance staff and includes staff in privately manged prisons. The number also includes some staff who were taken to hospital for non-COVID reasons and then subsequently tested positive in hospital.

The origins of the virus will often come from prison officers returning to the community, and we work hard to minimise the import of it into the prison estate.

We do not hold the figures on the number of the staff who required ventilation.

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 particularly where data is self-reported.