Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 9 February 2018 to Question 125714, what his Department's estimated cost is for determining on how many occasions wings of publicly-owned prisons were closed due to insufficient staff levels in December 2017.

The requested information is not recorded centrally as this is not a business requirement nor is it required under any accounting regulation. In respect of cost related to collate the information requested, we would need to collect this data from each individual prison, then collate it into a single figure. The time taken to complete this work would exceed the Department’s cost limit of £850 for answering a parliamentary question. We estimate a minimum cost of around £3,000 to create and collate this information separately.

As reported in the previous answer, the Government is fully committed to making our prisons safe and is actively taking the measures necessary to ensure that. We are giving prisons and Governors every possible support. We are boosting the number of prison officers by 2,500; and we are also giving officers the tools they need to manage violent offenders.