Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers vacancies were not filled in each prison in (a) May 2018 (b) May 2019.

The table attached provides the vacancies for Band 3-5 prison officers, by establishment (full time equivalent) on 31 March 2018 and 31 March 2019 – the most recent date for which statistics are available.

Retaining and recruiting engaged and motivated staff is critical to delivering the solutions to drive improvement across the service.

We met our target to increase prison officer numbers by 2,500 early last year and have now almost doubled that.

We continue to run targeted recruitment campaigns to boost frontline staff for some of our most difficult to recruit sites, fill our remaining vacancies and stay on top of attrition.