Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) items of post were received by prisoners and (b) items of contraband was found in prisoners' post in each of the last four years.

Prisons employ a range of measures to detect, disrupt and deter the trafficking of unauthorised items into prisons.

The number of individual items of post sent to prisoners is not recorded by prison establishments. Finds of contraband are recorded on a central incident reporting system as either a drug-related incident or a miscellaneous incident. In order to establish the number and type of contraband found in post received by prisoners, in each of the last four years, would require the interrogation of over 62,000 individual electronic incident files. This could only be achieved at disproportionate cost.