Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoner officers are employed on the prison estate, by ethnicity.

We have committed to increasing the diversity of our workforce and our target is to hire 14% of recruits from a BAME background by December 2020.

We have also conducted an independent review of the prison officer recruitment process and are implementing improvements to reduce the time and cost to hire, increase the diversity of new recruits and ensure we attract the right people with the right skills.

The number of band 3 to 5 prison officers in public sector prisons, by ethnicity as of 31^st March 2020 is given in the following table.

Table 1- Number of Band 3 to 5 Prison Officers¹ in post in public sector prisons, by Ethnicity², as at 31st March 2020

Notes

1.Includes Band 3-4 / Prison Officer (incl specialists), Band 4 / Supervising Officer and Band 5 / Custodial Managers.

2.Race is a self-declared, optional field.

3.Includes Chinese