Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department has taken to protect the safety of (a) frontline workers in the justice sector and (b) prisoners during the covid-19 outbreak.

The Government is very clear that our frontline staff are vital key workers, and they are going above and beyond the call of duty to keep the public, their colleagues, and service users safe . While we rightly celebrate our heroes in the NHS during this challenging period, our hidden heroes in the justice sector understandably can sometimes feel forgotten, and we extend our gratitude to all our leaders and staff for their bravery and dedication to public service.

The safety of our staff and service users remains our top priority. We are doing all that we can to be flexible and to support those who are more vulnerable to Covid-19, whether this be through age or an underlying health condition.

We continue to work with DHSC and the Welsh Government, to ensure that appropriate testing is made available to court, prison, and probation staff, to those service users in our care, and to those within our buildings.

In the prison system we continue to manage the risk to establishments through the use of cohorting and compartmentalisation, routine staff testing, and testing prisoners on both reception and transfer.  Social distancing and basic hygiene are also used to reduce transmission and we continue to provide access to cleaning and hygiene products in prisons. We are following the public health advice on the use of medical face masks alongside other items of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) where close contact is sustained, essential and unavoidable.  We also continue to operate reduced regimes, specifically designed with PHE, to reduce contact and support social distancing in prisons.

Probation staff and service users are already able to access testing as needed if they display any COVID-19 symptoms, and this will link them into the NHS Test and Trace system if they test positive.  We will continue to work with DHSC and Welsh Government, to ensure that appropriate testing is made available to probation staff and service users.  We have introduced regular asymptomatic testing of staff and residents in Approved Premises to limit the spread of the virus and protect the local NHS, and are rolling out lateral flow testing to all of our staff who cannot work from home.

In courts, we are spending £113m on a range of emergency measures to tackle the impact of COVID-19, and £142m to improve court and tribunal buildings and roll out new technology. This has enabled remote hearings where possible, and safety controls in every building for cases that need physical hearings. Safety controls include limitations on the number of people on sit, plexiglass screens, face coverings, and regular cleaning, to name just a few. Everything we do is kept under regular review and we continue to work closely with public health colleagues as part of that effort.