Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 7 February 2018 to Question 125711, on Prisoners: Childbirth, what estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of determining how many women in prison gave birth in 2017.

Births in prison are recorded locally. It is not practicable for all information held locally to be collected centrally as a matter of routine: information is collected centrally normally when there is a recurring need for it to be immediately available for management purposes. We will consider whether notifications of births should be added to the list of information we collect centrally.

Determining how many women in prison gave birth in 2017 would require examination of all female prisoner’s records. This would have to be done manually. We estimated the cost as in excess of £10,000.