I refer the Rt Hon member to PQ 4436, answered on 17 July 2017.

This information is not held or published centrally.

The table below details the number of applications that were made for a place on a prison mother and baby unit in the last five financial years, together with the number of applications approved and refused.

Table: Mother & Baby Units (MBU) Management Information, by year 2010/11 to 2016/17¹

(1) Figures are management information drawn from administrative data systems. They are provisional figures and subject to change following final quality assurance. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system.

(2) Not all applications to MBUs will be approved or refused, many will not proceed for other reasons. Applications may not be assessed in the month in which they are received.

The number of cancellations of scheduled transport for prisoners between prisons for the last 5 calendar years is provided in the table below.

Movement between prisons is robustly managed and cancellations occur for a broad range of operational reasons that include prisoner refusal, operational difficulties within discharging or receiving prison taking prioritisation, prisoner requiring medical treatment, and traffic delays en route.

Data for postponed transport is not recorded centrally.

The information requested was provided in response to PQ 64325, which was answered on 17 February 2016.

Governors and senior operational staff in prisons proactively manage the risk of unplanned closures and the effects on safety, staffing levels and delivery of effective regimes. The regime management plan was developed specifically to provide a tool to assist in this.

We have an established network of resettlement prisons which are used to facilitate the transition from custody into the community, to enable Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to work with those prisoners returning to their local area. The Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) is completed in all of these resettlement prisons at the beginning of a prisoner’s custodial sentence. It is not completed in non-resettlement prisons. A list of resettlement prisons is attached.

From the BCST records held centrally, removal of personally identifiable information could only be carried out at disproportionate cost. As you will appreciate it would not be appropriate to release the raw data as recorded, given the potential sensitivity of those records and indeed the regulations of the Data Protection Act.

List of resettlement prisons in England and Wales

Budgets are subject to in year movement and organisational restructure. Prison unit costs are published annually, providing the actual cost mechanism for all prisons. These are not comparable across the long term due to changes in accounting treatments and scope of business which do not provide a consistent basis. Additionally, the public sector and private sector costs are not directly comparable because of differences in method of financing and scope of services.

Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (formerly known as the National Offender Management Service), routinely publishes average costs per prisoner, costs per prison place and overall prison unit costs for each private and public sector prison in England and Wales. This information is produced on an annual basis and is published after the end of each financial year.

Information on actual prison expenditure for previous financial years can be accessed in the Prison and Probation Performance Statistics pages for each financial year on the https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/prison-and-probation-trusts-performance-statistics#prison-performance-statistics. Prison unit costs can be found within the Excel document Costs per prison place and cost per prisoner by individual prison establishment in the ‘Cost by Establishment’ tab.

The most recent published figures for financial year 2016-17 can be accessed on the www.gov.uk website from the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-performance-statistics-2016-to-2017

Within the costs per prison place and cost per prisoner 2016 to 2017 summary file, the figures for financial year 2015-16 have been restated to enable a more fair comparison between the two years.

Prison Budgets for future financial years have yet to reach a settlement and therefore have not yet been finalised.

The National Tactical Response Group (NTRG) provides additional support staff or resources to prisons to help them deal with a variety of incidents. The overwhelming majority of call outs are for non-violent incidents, including where they attended as a precaution and when the situation was resolved locally. NTRG deployments are detailed in the attached appendix:

Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service carry out Measuring the Quality of Life surveys of individual prisons on a rolling programme.

On Thursday 26 October, the Ministry of Justice launched Justice Data, a new public facing platform for presenting published performance data. The website will be accessible at https://www.data.justice.gov.uk/prisons and includes a year of MQPL performance on Safety and Decency.

Until 2016/17 the scores for some dimensions of the prisoner surveys were included in the Prison Rating System (PRS) which was published annually. The results for 2016/17 can be found on gov.uk at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-annual-performance-ratings-2016-to-2017 and previous years will be available in the PRS reports at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/prison-and-probation-trusts-performance-statistics

The PRS has been replaced with the Custodial Performance Tool and certain dimensions of the prisoner survey such as safety are part of this assessment. I have no plans to publish the reports of the Measuring the Quality of Life surveys as they are produced purely for management information.

This information is not held centrally and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost

The information requested is not centrally recorded.

The new Urgent Notification process allows Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons to directly alert the Secretary of State if he has an urgent and significant concern about the performance of a prison. The Secretary of State will then publish his response and a plan of action within 28 days. Both the Chief Inspector’s letter and the Secretary of State’s response will be published.

Since its introduction on 30 November 2017, the Chief Inspector of Prisons has not triggered the Urgent Notification process.

The Ministry of Justice is not responsible for meeting such costs in privately managed prisons. As per my Answer to Question 117497, the costs of any re-locking in privately managed prisons in 2016/17 were met by the providers.

The information requested is not held centrally and could be obtained only at disproportionate cost.

The budget allocation for National Tactical Response Group (NTRG) is shown below. These figures include pay and non-pay items (including training materials, operational incident consumables and vehicle costs). It is not possible to retrieve the 2010 data information within the time available.

NTRG staff work from one of two centres, and are deployed to establishments as the need arises. The deployment of NTRG staff to establishments is managed centrally and subject to operational considerations and priorities. The decision to deploy our specialist resources can be taken as a precautionary measure, however it is usually in response to an ongoing incident or disorder.

Information on how many prisoners in excess of Certified Normal Accommodation there have been in the prison estate in England and Wales in each of the last five years is set out in the following table. This information can also be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/prison-population-statistics We do not forecast CNA levels.

Note: CNA, or uncrowded capacity, is the HM Prison Service’s own measure of accommodation. CNA represents the good, decent standard of accommodation that the Service aspires to provide all prisoners.

We will always have enough prison places for those sent to us by the courts. Our reforms will close ageing and ineffective prisons and replace them with buildings fit for today’s demands. Our prison estate will have modern prison places that create the physical conditions for Governors to achieve better educational, training and rehabilitation outcomes.