Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison guards were working in high security prisons by grade on 1 May in each year since 2010.

The quarterly HMPPS workforce statistics publication covers staffing information and the latest publication covers data up to 31 March 2024.

HM Prison and Probation Service workforce statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Ensuring we attract people with the right skills and retain them so they can progress their career in HMPPS is a key priority, we are working hard to retain and develop clear career paths for our operational staff.

We have invested in several new initiatives to improve the experience of our new joiners and increase retention of our employees.

These include:

• a new peer-to-peer learning scheme
• the introduction of New Colleague Mentors for all staff
• the Career Pathways Framework

To help stem attrition we have implemented a Retention Strategy which is linked to wider activities to improve employee experience, employee lifecycle and staff engagement at work.

Nationally, we have seen a substantial improvement in the national staffing picture within prisons over the past year. The number of Band 3-5 prison officers increased by 1,396 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) between March 2023 and March 2024. This is the result of significant efforts across the agency, including substantial increases in pay for staff, our first-ever nationwide advertising campaign, recruitment schemes where we incentivised applicants to relocate to ‘harder-to-staff’ sites, and the Prison Officer Alumni Network, where we have fast-tracked former staff back into the service

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