Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of firearms found in prisons in each year since 2010.

We publish the number of incidents where weapons were found in prison in England and Wales in the HMPPS Annual Digest, the latest issue covering the period from April 2021 to March 2022. Information beyond this period cannot be included as it would provide an early indication of future National Statistics. The category ‘weapon’ has been formally recorded since October 2015 and prior to this date incidents where weapons were found, including firearms, were not collated centrally.

Incidents where weapons were found in prison custody can include finds of multiple weapons; the figures in the table count the number of incidents where a firearm was found rather than the number of firearms. This incident type records any imitation or real firearms found.

Data Sources and Quality

These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing returns but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level.