Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many prisoners were transferred to (1) psychiatric hospitals, (2) psychiatric wings of prisons, and (3) other hospitals, in each of the last 12 months.

From the data held centrally, we are unable to differentiate between transfers to (1) psychiatric and (3) other hospitals. Further, for (2) prisons do not have psychiatric wings, and data on occupancy of dedicated residential healthcare facilities in prisons are not collected centrally.

We can provide the total number of prisoners who have been transferred to hospital under sections 47 (sentenced prisoners) or 48 (remand prisoners/immigration detainees) of the Mental Health Act 1983 in the last 12 months and this is set out below:

These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large-scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

Information is collected on the number of transfers, not the number of individual prisoners who are transferred. An individual prisoner may be transferred more than once in any given time period.

We take the mental health of prisoners extremely seriously, which is why we have increased the support available to vulnerable offenders - especially during the first 24 hours in custody - and invested more in mental health awareness training for prison officers.