Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what plans his Department has to increase the number of prison governor and managerial level staff at pay bands seven to 11 in each of the next two years.

The Government is already taking action to ensure that all prisons are staffed appropriately at all levels to ensure that they are safe. We are on target to recruit an additional 2500 Prison Officers by December 2018 to improve safety and offender management in custody. We have also introduced new schemes to attract top graduates and former servicemen and women into the service as well as new schemes to move talented internal candidates into managerial roles.

HMPPS has recently changed the internal assessment processes for Head of Function roles (Band 7 and Band 8 staff) to speed up the selection processes. Since this change over 70 staff are now accredited to take up Head of Function roles. There are planned internal assessments throughout 2018 to be able to meet demand. There are also plans to reinvigorate the selection processes for Governor posts (at Bands 10 and 11) which will again run through 2018 to meet demand.

Since April 2017 Governors have been empowered to manage workforce planning locally and use this flexibility to set their own staffing arrangements.