Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison staff were deployed on detached duty in each month of 2018.

Detached Duty (DD) is one of the sensible and proportionate measures we take to ensure we run safe and decent regimes in prisons and respond appropriately to any operational issues that arise. The deployment of staff between prisons on DD is a regular and normal part of prison resourcing; the number of Prison Officers deployed on DD varies from one week to the next in order to reflect operational circumstances.

Detached Duty is allocated on a cycle (4 week average) rather than on a month by month basis. Annex A shows the average number of staff deployed in each Detached Duty cycle in 2018.