Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the prison population of HMP Birmingham has been in each month since May 2010.

HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) has (since 20 August) exercised its right under the contract to step in and take over the running of HMP Birmingham for an initial period of six months. This ‘step in’ action means that we can provide additional resources and support to the prison in order to directly address the areas of failure identified, and can subsequently recover the cost of doing so from G4S in accordance with the terms of the contract.

We have already allocated experienced HM Prison and Probation Service officers to bolster existing staffing at HMP Birmingham, and an initial 32 experienced public sector officers have begun working at the prison. We are also strengthening the management team and reducing the prison’s capacity.

This table provides the numbers of National Offender Management Service staff (full time equivalent), in post at HMP Birmingham by Grade, at 31 March 2010

*Other and unknown grades include more unusual grades and a small number of staff where the grade was not recorded at the time the data was extracted.

This table provides the numbers of funded staff in place at HMP Birmingham as of 1 August 2018. Further support was provided on 20 August 2018 by tornado teams, two members of staff on secondment and one further staff member on detached duty.

Information relating to prison population is published regularly including figures for HMP Birmingham can be found at the following link;

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/prisons-and-probation-statistics

Figures for the population of HMP Birmingham taken at the end of each month from May 2010 May until June 2018 are included in this table. It should be noted that the figures in this table have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.