Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much was spent from the public purse on (a) hotels and (b) other expenses for prison officers on detached duty in each year since 2010.

Detached duty is one of the sensible and proportionate measures we take to cover resourcing pressures and ensure we run safe and decent regimes in prisons as well as being able to respond appropriately to any operational issues that arise.

The information on the HMPPS central accounting system is not recorded in a format that allows the disaggregation of hotel and other expenses costs for prison officer grades on detached duty without incurring disproportionate cost. To collate the information requested, we would need to identify those prison officers on detached duty and cross reference and examine expenses records for each year since 2010. This would exceed the Department’s cost limit of £850 for answering a parliamentary question. We estimate a minimum cost of around £6,000 to extract and collate this information separately.