Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many violent incidents occurred at shared phones in prison landings in each year from 2012 to 2018.
This information is not recorded centrally and could be obtained only at disproportionate cost.
We recognise that access to telephones can be one of the causes of violence in prisons. As part of our prison safety programme we have developed a violence diagnostic tool that allows prisons to analyse patterns of violent incidents and to identify any ‘hotspots’, such as telephone queues, where preventative action needs to be taken.