Prison Officers: Sick Leave

(asked on 9th May 2019) - View Source
Questioner
Richard Burgon Portrait
Richard Burgon
(Labour - Leeds East)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officer days have been lost due to being off work for mental health reasons in each year since 2010.

Answered by
Robert Buckland Portrait
Robert Buckland
This question was answered on 17th May 2019

HM Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) is committed to ensuring the health, safety and wellbeing of its staff, with all staff having access to a comprehensive occupational health service and employee assistance programme.

HMPPS continuously monitors and re-assesses the support and interventions in place for staff. To this end HMPPS changed its delivery model for employee assistance services (EAP) and the new EAP model has significantly enhanced and changed access to the help and support previously available to HMPPS staff and includes specialist Trauma Support and a manager’s helpline amongst other services. The model also enables staff to self-refer for counselling by calling the 24 hour helpline in complete confidentiality.

The number of working days that band 3-5 officers lost due to mental and behavioural disorders is provided in table 1 below.

Table 1: Band 3-5 officer1 working days lost due to mental & behavioural disorders2, 2009/10 to 2017/18

Financial year

Working days lost due to mental & behavioural disorders

Percent of known sickness reasons4

2009/10

60,697

21.0

2010/11

57,794

22.4

2011/12

60,782

24.2

2012/13

57,895

23.9

2013/14

63,209

27.0

2014/15

59,858

27.5

2015/16

57,807

29.4

2016/173

60,887

32.6

2017/183

47,769

29.9

1 Includes Band 3-4 / Prison Officer (incl specialists), Band 4 / Supervising Officer and Band 5 / Custodial Managers.

2 Absences are categorised according to the International Classification of Diseases, which is an approach used across the civil service.

3 Between January and March 2017, during migration of data to the Single Operating Platform, an under-recording of sickness absence records occurred. Therefore, there is likely to be an undercount of working days lost for the 12 months to 31 March 2017. Furthermore, investigations are ongoing regarding more recent sickness absence data so figures for the 12 months to 31 March 2018 should be treated with caution.

4 Working days lost due to mental & behavioural disorders as a proportion of total working days lost, excluding where the reason for sickness is unknown.

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