Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to his speech to the Royal Society of Arts on 6 March 2018, what estimate he has made of the number of prisoners identified as ring leaders.

We are committed to making sure that prisons are safe, decent and support rehabilitation. That is why we have invested £14m to tackle serious and organised crime, which impacts on the community and is one of the major root causes of instability in prisons.

The impact of harms like violence and drug use are clear, but these are often the result of prisoners who ostensibly behave, but have others do their bidding. We need to cut these prisoners off from their network and prevent them from operating, to create environments in which prisoners can be rehabilitated.

Through our own data, and closer work with law enforcement, we are looking at how we can better use intelligence and information to identify these ringleaders among the 6,500 prisoners who have links to organised crime and target them for disruption. Due to the sensitive nature of this data, I am unable to disclose more precise figures.