Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many assaults on staff there were by prisoners in HMP (a) Maidstone, (b) Huntercombe and (c) Morton Hall in each of the last five years; and what the national average was for those assaults.

Please see the below table showing the number and rate of assaults on staff in HMP (a) Maidstone, (b) Huntercombe and (c) Morton Hall in each of the last five years, together with the rate of assaults on staff across the estate as a whole.

Number and rate per 1,000 prisoners of assaults on staff¹ within prison custody, 2019 to 2023

These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing returns but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level.

(1) Assaults on staff are a subset of all assault incidents. Some assault incidents may be recorded as both a prisoner-on-prisoner assault and an assault on staff.

(2) Rates express the number of incidents per 1,000 prisoners, and give a more reliable indicator of trends than numbers of incidents because they take account of changes in the prison population over time. The rates are calculated by dividing the number of incidents occurring within a twelve-month period by the average prison population at the end of each month within the same period, multiplied by 1,000. The prison population figures are published in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly.