Prison and Probation Service: Staff
(asked on 11th May 2020) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of (a) directly and (b) non-directly employed HMPPS staff are currently (i) working from home, (ii) furloughed or (iii) attending the workplace, by grade; and if he will make a statement.
HMPPS is committed to the principle of maintaining social distancing and regular hand hygiene to protect staff and those in our care from COVID-19.
In HMPPS HQ, nearly all staff are working from home and able to carry out their usual duties. Only a small handful of staff continue to go into work where absolutely necessary. The vast majority of operational staff in prisons, however, continue to attend the workplace – for these staff we are providing PPE where appropriate. In probation, most offenders are being supervised remotely, enabling most probation staff to work remotely. Some probation staff will be required to attend the workplace for face-to-face appointments with the most complex and high-risk offenders. No HMPPS staff have been furloughed.
We are unable to provide data on the total number of HMPPS staff working from home (as this is collected by exception), nor can we provide data broken down by grade or by direct/non-direct employment status.
However, we are able to provide the total number of public sector prison and probation staff who are working from home and unable fulfil all of their usual duties outside of their usual place of work. The following table provides that information as at 8 May and also a breakdown of those staff as a proportion of our overall headcount of directly employed staff, and split for key operational grades.
HMPPS Service area | Total staff1 | Proportion of total staff in post (headcount) |
| Staff at key operational grades2 | Proportion of key operational grade staff in post (headcount) |
Public sector prison staff including Youth Offender Institutes (directly employed staff only) | 130 | less than 1% |
| 20 | less than 1% |
National Probation Service staff including Approved Premises | 1280 | 11% |
| 960 | 11% |
Total | 1400 | 3% |
| 980 | 3% |
Source: HMPPS COVID-19 absences data collection
1 Numbers may not sum due to rounding
2 Key operational grades refer to:
Prisons: Operational Support and Band 3-5 Prison Officers
National Probation Service: Residential workers and case administrators (approved Premises) Band 3-5 Probation Officers (NPS and Approved Premises)
Data Sources & Quality
These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS COVID-19 data collection. Care is taken when processing and analysing returns but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level. This data has been self-reported and has not yet been checked against our central databases.