Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoner-on-staff hostage incidents there have been in each year since 2010.

Hostage incidents within prisons are rare occurrences and HMPPS has comprehensive contingencies in place to resolve them as safely as possible. We have trained negotiators and intervention staff who provide a range of tactical interventions to establishments experiencing incidents of this nature. If an immediate threat to life is identified HMPPS has an agreed protocol with the Armed Policing Portfolio to hand over control of the incident, however we have not needed to call on the protocol since 1989.

The table below provides details of hostage incidents, broken down by victim type each year from March 2010 to March 2021. We publish hostage data in the HMPPS annual digest, therefore we are unable to release data for the period from March 2021 to March 22 until the data is released in July 2022.

Note: These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS 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.