Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps she has taken to implement the IMB Annual Reports on prisons in England and Wales.

All Independent Monitoring Board annual reports for prisons are responded to by Ministers. Those responses set out what has or will be done to address issues identified by Boards. I wrote to the Chair of the Birmingham Board on 28 November 2016 in response to the concerns raised in their report.

The long-standing challenges in our prison estate cannot be fixed overnight but the Justice Secretary and I are absolutely committed to making prisons places of safety and reform. We already embarking on a major recruitment drive to boost the frontline with 2,500 extra prison officers and are putting in place new security measures to tackle drones, phones and drugs, which undermine safety.