Asked by: Rosena Allin-Khan (Labour - Tooting)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many days HMP Wandsworth has been at a (a) red, (b) amber-red and (c) amber-green operating state since 1 February 2023.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
During the period since 1 Feb 2023, the regime at the prison has been at Green-Amber status for three weeks, and at Amber-Red for 51 weeks. Amber-Red confers that a safe, decent, secure, resilient and sustainable regime is being delivered, including purposeful activities, showers and exercise, and all essential services.
To improve regime delivery there has been significant focus on the recruitment of staff at HMP Wandsworth, with 66 new prison officers currently in training and being deployed to the prison in the coming weeks. In the meantime, HMP Wandsworth is being provided with continuing support through additional “Payment Plus” hours, equivalent to 39 additional prison officers. The Prison will continue to receive support as required and regularly reviews the level of regime it is able safely to deliver.
Asked by: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many times prison officers were deployed on detached duty in 2023.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Staff on national detached duty are entitled to a bonus payment that varies depending on the length of the deployment. Details are given in the table below:
4 weeks | 8 weeks | 12 weeks |
£500 | £1200 | £2000 |
Additionally, and in line with the National Travel and Subsistence policy (PSI 15/2021), staff are entitled to claim overnight subsistence at £25 per night, and business mileage at a rate of 45p per mile for any additional travel incurred, as well as for the cost of bed and breakfast accommodation where applicable, at rates that vary depending on the location.
An average of 332.35 staff each week were deployed on national detached duty during 2023.
Asked by: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what additional allowances are paid to prison officers on detached duty.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Staff on national detached duty are entitled to a bonus payment that varies depending on the length of the deployment. Details are given in the table below:
4 weeks | 8 weeks | 12 weeks |
£500 | £1200 | £2000 |
Additionally, and in line with the National Travel and Subsistence policy (PSI 15/2021), staff are entitled to claim overnight subsistence at £25 per night, and business mileage at a rate of 45p per mile for any additional travel incurred, as well as for the cost of bed and breakfast accommodation where applicable, at rates that vary depending on the location.
An average of 332.35 staff each week were deployed on national detached duty during 2023.
Asked by: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many times a (a) Tornado and (b) national tactical response team was deployed to HMP Lowdham Grange in the last 24 months.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The National Tactical Response Group (NTRG) are a specialist resource that provide intervention options to the Silver and Gold commanders. NTRG is a highly trained team that provide expertise in technical interventions that would carry higher risk of failure or injury, and which require skills and equipment limited only to NTRG staff.
Operation Tornado is a national mutual aid plan by which prisons support one another in the event of a serious incident or occurrence requiring a reinforcement of staff. Operation Tornado is employed by HMPPS for three main reasons:
In the 24 months from January 2022 there were 3 Tornado activations.
In the 24 months from January 2022 there were 40 national tactical response team deployments.
The Ministry of Justice took over the running of HMP Lowdham Grange on 18 December 2023 for an interim period to improve safety and security at the prison.
The immediate steps to stabilise the prison include:
Asked by: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many assaults were committed against prison staff by prisoners in HMP Lowdham Grange in (a) 2021, (b) 2022 and (c) 2023.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
We publish the number of assaults against prison staff, broken down by establishment, as part of our Safety in Custody statistics, in Table 8e of the summary tables, available at the following link: Safety in custody: quarterly update to September 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).
Totals for those occurring at HMP Lowdham Grange can be seen at row 96. Please note that the number of assaults occurring in October-December 2023 cannot be provided as they are due for publication at the end of April.
While the overall rate of staff assault across the prison estate remains below pre-pandemic levels, we continue to ensure all our hardworking staff are protected and will never tolerate violence against our hardworking prison officers. Prisoners who are violent towards staff will face the full consequences of their actions and will be dealt with swiftly and effectively, which includes further time behind bars.
We are providing staff in the adult male estate with a personal safety training package in order to protect them from serious violence. We also continue to provide targeted support to prisons to operate the Challenge, Support and Intervention Plan (CSIP) which provides a framework for managing violence that is centred around the individual needs of prisoners, helping them to move away from violent behaviours.
Asked by: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how long on average it takes to train new prison officers.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
All new Prison Officers receive a minimum of ten weeks of training which provides them with the skills required to be a competent prison officer.
Asked by: Janet Daby (Labour - Lewisham East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers have been dismissed for (a) supplying and (b) transporting drugs in the youth secure estate in each of the last 10 years.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The vast majority of prison staff are hardworking and dedicated. A minority of staff engage in corrupt activity which is often as a result of conditioning and manipulation by prisoners.
HM Prison & Probation Service has a zero-tolerance policy to drugs conveyed into prisons and take appropriate action to a small number of prison staff who break the rules. Our £100m Security Investment Programme, aimed at reducing crime in prisons, including reducing the conveyance of illicit items such as drugs and mobile phones, is ongoing. This includes increased resource to pursue corruption, as well as established a new ‘Prevent’ function, aimed at building staff resilience against corruption.
Below is a table showing the breakdown of staff dismissed from 2019 to Dec 2023 within the Youth Custody Service (YCS) for drug related offences.
Table 1
Year | Conveyance of drugs |
TOTAL | 1 |
2019 | 0 |
2020 | 0 |
2021 | 1 |
2022 | 0 |
2023 | 0 |
Source: Linkspace Case Management System.
Notes:
Linkspace is the Counter Corruption Unit’s (CCU) Case Management System used to record and track cases linked to corruption.
Data provided by the CCU have the following Caveats applied below;
1) The new Counter Corruption Unit came into being in April 2019, with a new structure and a change to ways of working. During the initial transition period, and prior to the introduction of the new Case Management System, it is possible that not all arrests were being captured.
2) Prior to April 2019, corruption in HMPPS was managed by the Corruption Prevention Unit (CPU). The CPU was a largely centralised unit focused on sanitising and disseminating all corruption related intelligence to the Police, with an individual Regional Corruption Prevention Manager (RCPM) in each geographical region offering advice and support to prisons in managing corruption, Hence data prior to April 2019 is not available.
3) Data includes Non-Directly Employed Staff (public or private) as they provide a service on behalf of HMPPS.
4) ‘Supplying and transporting’ of drugs in a prison falls under the definition of ‘conveyance of drugs’ and recorded on the CCU’s Case Management System to cases linked to drugs related offences.
Asked by: Janet Daby (Labour - Lewisham East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department holds on the number of prison officers who were dismissed for having intimate relationships with young people in the youth secure estate in each year since 2014.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The vast majority of prison staff are hardworking and dedicated. A minority of staff engage in corrupt activity which is often as a result of conditioning and manipulation by prisoners.
HM Prison & Probation Service has a zero-tolerance policy on staff who form inappropriate relationships with prisoners and take appropriate action to a small number of prison staff who break the rules. Our £100m Security Investment Programme, aimed at reducing crime in prisons, including reducing the number of staff being manipulated and conditioned by prisoners, is ongoing. This includes increased resource to pursue corruption, as well as established a new ‘Prevent’ function, aimed at building staff resilience against corruption.
Below is a table showing the breakdown of staff dismissed from 2019 to Dec 2023 within the Youth Custody Service (YCS) for having an inappropriate relationship offences.
Table 1
Year | Inappropriate relationships |
TOTAL | 3 |
2019 | 1 |
2020 | 1 |
2021 | 1 |
2022 | 0 |
2023 | 0 |
Source: Linkspace Case Management System.
Notes:
Linkspace is the Counter Corruption Unit’s (CCU) Case Management System used to record and track cases linked to corruption.
Data provided by the CCU have the following Caveats applied below;
1) The new Counter Corruption Unit came into being in April 2019, with a new structure and a change to ways of working. During the initial transition period, and prior to the introduction of the new Case Management System, it is possible that not all arrests were being captured.
2) Prior to April 2019, corruption in HMPPS was managed by the Corruption Prevention Unit (CPU). The CPU was a largely centralised unit focused on sanitising and disseminating all corruption related intelligence to the Police, with an individual Regional Corruption Prevention Manager (RCPM) in each geographical region offering advice and support to prisons in managing corruption, Hence data prior to April 2019 is not available.
3) Data includes Non-Directly Employed Staff (public or private) as they provide a service on behalf of HMPPS.
Asked by: Janet Daby (Labour - Lewisham East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether prison officers working in the youth secure estate receive training on tackling violence against women and girls.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The Youth Custody Service (YCS) recognises that girls have specific needs that require a gender-specific approach. A national Girls Oversight Board has been established to lead on the work of providing a dedicated care strategy, appropriate complex case management, and learning and development for staff.
A bespoke training offer is being developed by YCS Psychology Services for staff working with girls in our Young Offender Institution and Secure Training Centre sectors. This will cover a range of gender-specific issues that directly affect girls and young women.
Placement decisions in relation to girls in the youth secure estate take full account of the wider population of children. The Ministry of Justice expects standards of behaviour towards girls and women to be modelled and challenged appropriately by operational staff, and the mixing of cohorts is closely supervised at all times.
Asked by: Lord Dobbs (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government, in each of the past five years in England and Wales, how many prosecutions were brought for rape and serious sexual assault; how many allegations of rape or serious sexual assault reported to police have not been taken to prosecution; and what percentage of prosecutions have resulted in conviction.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
This government is committed to increasing the volumes of rape and serious sexual offence cases that reach court.
In 2019, we commissioned our end-to-end Rape Review to better understand the justice system’s response to adult rape. Published in 2021, our watershed report set stretching ambitions to return the volumes of adult rape cases being referred by the police, charged by the CPS, and reaching court back to 2016 levels by the end of this Parliament. In practice, this meant more than doubling the number of adult rape cases reaching court compared to when the Review was first commissioned, in 2019.
The latest data shows that we have exceeded each of these ambitions ahead of schedule. In July – September 2023, we recorded:
In addition, the number of people prosecuted for an adult rape offence went up by 54% in the last year (12 months to June), rising from 1,410 to 2,165. This is 32% higher than in 2010 (1,644).
But we are determined to build on these successes, and continue to make excellent progress in delivering our Rape Review Action Plan to support victims throughout the criminal justice system:
As far as possible, we have provided the requested data in Tables 1-3. Please note that each table contains data extracted from different administrative systems, and for different operational purposes. Whilst every effort has been made to answer the question and keep the data similar it is important to note that the data presented is complementary, rather than directly comparable. Below is a summary of each table and its contents, including a final Annex table (Table A1) which specifies how offences for rape and serious sexual assault have been captured.
Table 1 – Volume of defendants proceeded against for rape or ‘serious’ sexual assault offences, year ending June 2019 to year ending June 2023, England and Wales
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) publish the data set out in Table 1 in Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: June 2023, in the Outcomes by Offence data tool (last updated 18 January 2024).
The MoJ tool contains data on the volume of convictions, but it is advised these are not used to calculate conviction rate (the number of convictions as a proportion of the number of prosecutions). This is due to the Court Proceedings Database counting two separate records at two separate stages (one for prosecution, one for conviction). An individual may appear at each court in separate years, or for a different principal offence at different stages. As a result, this rate is not an accurate measure of the proportion of prosecutions that result in a conviction and we recommend table 3 for that purpose.
Table 2 – Rape and ‘serious’ sexual offences (RASSO) recorded by the police that were not assigned a charge outcome, as a proportion of all RASSO cases closed each year, year ending June 2019 to year ending June 2023, England and Wales
The Home Office (HO) publish the data set out in Table 2 in the quarterly publication Open Data Tables, in the Outcomes Open Data files (last updated on 25 January 2024). It is important to note that the Home Office do not hold data on prosecutions, but publish data on recorded cases that do not receive a charge outcome, presented in Table 2.
Table 2b – Number of reported incidents of rape (excluding offences recorded by the police) and cancelled rape offences, year ending March 2019 to year ending March 2023, England and Wales
Since April 2015, the police have been expected to record all allegations of rape that are reported to them as soon as they are received, unless they are immediately recorded as a confirmed crime. These are recorded under the reported incidents classification. Reported incidents of rape are then either confirmed as a crime and re-classified accordingly (as recorded offences) or are retained in the police data as an incident. Table 2b shows a total of reported incidents that do not go on to be recorded as a crime, and cancelled rape offences. An incident does not go on to be recorded as a crime if the victim or third party reporting the incident cannot confirm it or cannot be traced, if credible evidence to the contrary exists, or if it is transferred to another police force. These data are published here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652eaab16b6fbf000db75843/prc-rape-incidents-2016-2023.ods). Rape allegations are ‘cancelled’ when there is additional information to confirm the offence did not take place or where the entry is made in error (such as a duplicate of an existing allegation). Home Office can be contacted directly for further comment on these data.
Table 3 – Conviction rate for suspects with a rape flagged offence, year ending June 2019 to year ending June 2023, England and Wales
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) publish the data set out in Table 3 in CPS quarterly data summaries (last updated on 18 January 2024). Prosecution crime type data tables were used to extract conviction rates for rape flagged cases. Due to the nature of CPS systems, the conviction rate based on rape flags will include cases where the eventual outcome is different to the flagged offence of rape.
Table A1: Definition of rape and 'serious' sexual assault by organisation (MoJ, Home Office, Crown Prosecution Service)
This table sets out how rape and ‘serious’ sexual assault offences have been selected for each of the tables. The most substantial difference is between CPS and MoJ/Home Office data, as the CPS rely on the use of flags and do not record offences by detailed offence code in the same way as the MoJ/Home Office (meaning detailed offences would need to be extracted manually, and are not published). Home Office and MoJ offences broadly correspond but, due to differences in recording practices and operational uses some of the offences follow different description conventions.