Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much his Department has spent from the public purse on promoted content on (a) Twitter, (b) Facebook and (c) Instagram in each month since June 2017.

Digital advertising is a cost-effective way for the government to recruit prison officers, help people find out about the courts process and all the other important information the public needs to be aware of.

The Ministry of Justice has spent £171,635.80 on promoted activity with these platforms over the period of 1 June 2017 to 30 September 2018. There may be some spend in certain months which will carry over into the following month. This spend was with Facebook and was to support a number of recruitment campaigns across HMPPS. There was no spend with Twitter or Instagram over this period.

It should be noted that we passed our target to recruit an additional 2,500 prison officers by the end of 2018, seven months early, and have now recruited over 3,500 new staff since that commitment was made in October 2016.

Detail of the monthly spend is shown in the table below.