Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many hostage incidents in which a (a) prison officer and (b) prisoner was taken hostage have taken place in each prison establishment since January 2010.

Violence in prisons has increased in recent years. These figures demonstrate that the Prime Minister and the Justice Secretary are right and out prisons badly need reform.

We are already trialling the use of body worn cameras in prisons, training sniffer dogs to detect new psychoactive substances and have made it an offence to smuggle new psychoactive substances into prison. However, ultimately the only way to reduce violence in our prisons is to give governors and those who work in prisons the tools necessary to more effectively rehabilitate offenders.

Hostage incidents are rare occurrences. The table attached provides details of hostage incidents, broken down by establishment and victim type.

Note: These figures have been drawn from the NOMS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing the returns but the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although the figures are shown to the last case the figures may not be accurate to that level.