Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to prevent suicides in prison.

The Government takes very seriously its responsibility to keep prisoners safe, and we are committed to reducing the number of self-inflicted deaths and the incidence of self-harm across the estate. This is why we have established a prison safety programme through which we are taking forward a comprehensive set of actions to improve safety in custody. They include:

• investing in over 4,300 additional staff in order to deliver consistent, purposeful regimes;
• improving staff knowledge and understanding of the factors known to increase risk of self-harm, to help them to identify and respond appropriately to prisoners at risk. Our revised introduction to suicide and self-harm prevention training has already reached over 24,000 staff;
• improving the flow, quality and use of risk information about people coming into our prisons, to support effective decision-making about risk;
• producing an early days toolkit to help staff enhance the support that they provide for prisoners during the first few days and weeks in custody;
• renewing our partnership with Samaritans by confirming a further three years’ funding for their valuable Listeners Scheme, and working with them to share learning from the ‘Coping with Life in Prisons’ project, a successful pilot initiative in which Samaritans-trained ex-prisoners delivered emotional resilience training to groups of newly-arrived prisoners; and
• improving the multi-disciplinary ACCT case management process for those identified as at risk of self-harm or suicide.