Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service Annual Report and Accounts 2019–20, published on 24 September 2020, what assessment he has made of the reasons for the increase in the resignation rate for band 3-5 prison officers.

The Ministry of Justice publishes quarterly workforce statistics for Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. The most recently published data for band 3-5 officers operational prison officers, shows the resignation rate was 7.2% in the year ending 30 June 2020, which is a decrease of 0.8 percentage points since the year ending 31 March 2020. Of those band 3-5 operational prison officers that have resigned there is an increasing proportion of leavers with lower time in service: in March 2018 69% of all resignations were for staff within their first three years of service, whereas in March 2019, March 2020 and June 2020 it was 78%, 76% and 75% respectively.

Since 2016, we have recruited around 4,000 new prison officers who have worked through unprecedented challenges to protect prisoners and the public. A larger workforce means more leavers, but we are working hard to retain staff with better pay, additional training to progress their careers, and significant investment in tools to keep them safe.

We have created a retention programme which is linked to wider activities around employee experience, employee lifecycle and staff engagement at work. We are looking at leaver trend data and using exit interviews to establish the drivers of attrition in Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. This work consists of reviewing existing policy, process and benefit arrangements for staff to establish how best to optimise them in order to retain a leading presence in the labour market, as an employer of choice.