Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether he plans to change the function of Risley prison.

The Government set out its ambition for a reformed prison estate in the November 2016 Prison Safety and Reform White Paper.

Through the prison estate transformation programme we are getting the basics right by building decent prisons to improve rehabilitation and create safe and secure environments for staff and offenders. As well as constructing up to 10,000 new prison places we are reconfiguring the existing estate so that prisoners will be held in the right place at the right time and their rehabilitation can be managed more effectively.

HMP Risley is currently a category C training prison and a hub for foreign national offenders (FNOs) with an embedded Home Office Immigration Enforcement (HOIE) team. The Prison Estate Transformation Programme aims to simplify the estate to align the supply of prison places with demand. Part of the planned changes will see HMP Risley increase its FNO population, becoming an FNO Specialist Prison. This will allow greater concentration of those offenders of interest to HOIE, who are currently dispersed throughout the prison estate, and deliver a more focused service to these offenders.