Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure the efficient and timely transfer of prisoners to hospitals under the Mental Health Act 1983; and how many prisoners have waited for more than 14 days for such a transfer in each of the last three years.

NHS England is working with partners across the criminal justice system to improve services for offenders with mental ill health and have developed a comprehensive 10 point plan which clearly sets out the work underway to improve the pathway to and from prison to appropriate in-patient mental health care services. This will set out actions to improve the timely transfer and remission of patients, including how this will be implemented and sustained.

Information on how many prisoners have waited for more than 14 days for a transfer to hospital under the Mental Health Act 1983 in each of the last three years is not available in the format requested.

Information is collected on the number of transfers, not the number of individual prisoners who are transferred. An individual prisoner may undergo more than one transfer in any given time period.