Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many times prison officers confiscated illegally brewed alcohol in each prison in England and Wales in each month in 2013.

The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) has in place a comprehensive range of security measures and searching techniques to detect items of contraband including alcohol and to prevent smuggling into prisons. In addition we use specially trained dogs to detect illicit alcohol.

NOMS does not centrally record as a separate category the number of occasions on which alcohol is confiscated in prisons and could not provide the information without incurring disproportionate cost.