Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many cells across the England and Wales prison estate were unoccupied in each month between 1 August 2024 and 31 July 2026; and what the stated reasons were for unoccupancy.

HMPPS manages and reports prison capacity in places rather than individual cells. The occupancy status of individual cells is managed locally and is not collated centrally. To provide the information at cellular level for each month requested would therefore incur disproportionate cost.

The closest centrally held measure is the difference between the total useable operational capacity of the prison estate and the prison population, or headroom. This represents useable prison places that were unoccupied on each reporting date in the adult male, female and youth estates. The figures are set out in the table below.