Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much of his Department's budget was spent on food in prisons in each of the last five years; and what proportion of the food supplied to prisons in each of those years was produced by UK farmers.

The spending information is not collected centrally and could not be provided without incurring disproportionate cost. Prison food budgets are determined locally (by the Governor in public sector prisons, or the Director in privately managed prisons) and kept under review as part of normal budget allocation planning.

While the contract requires our food supplier to provide a monthly country of origin report, it is not possible from this to disaggregate supply from British farming.