Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to reform the prisoner telephony contract with the external commercial provider so that inmates are subject to the same terms and conditions as customers in the community.

The current supplier of the telephony service provides a service within the public prison estate which is not directly comparable to the services they provide to their customers in the community. In the prison estate, they also provide the network infrastructure and devices, a call management solution to allow for management of PIN phone accounts and to support call monitoring, and a call routing service to connect to phone numbers that have been permitted by HMPPS. The cost of the service is predominantly funded through prisoner credit purchases.