Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to Annual Report of the Independent Monitoring Board at HMP Wealstun, published on 14 October 2021, what estimate he has made of the rate of false positives in scans for secreted items; and what recent assessment he has made of (a) the impact on procedural justice and (b) the efficacy for eliminating flows of contraband into prisons of automatically placing a prisoner on report when a scan indicates the possible presence of a secreted item.

The use of an X-ray body scanner must be fully justified, proportionate and the individual or societal benefit of the exposure must outweigh any potential health risks. It is a mandatory requirement that the justification for the scan is recorded in all cases. Prisoners are not routinely or randomly scanned and are only scanned on the basis of intelligence or suspicion, in cases where a full search would not be effective.

At this time, we are not able to accurately estimate the rate of false positives. This is because once a positive scan has been indicated, prisoners are referred to healthcare and offered the opportunity to privately remove and surrender any items they may be concealing internally. If they do not choose to or are not able to do this, they will be kept isolated from the rest of the prisoner population until they pass and dispose of the item or produce a negative scan. They are then able to return to the prison population once they have received a negative scan. Therefore, not all positive scans relate to a ‘find’ as prisoners often dispose of the items privately, and they do not enter the prison environment.