Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the Answer of 26 June 2023 to Question 190334, whether he has made an estimate of the number of (a) prison officers and (b) other prison staff who have been (i) investigated, (ii) arrested and (iii) charged in relation to the supply of drugs in prisons in each of the last six months.

The vast majority of prison staff are hardworking and dedicated. A minority of staff engage in corrupt activity.

HM Prison & Probation Service has a zero-tolerance policy to drugs conveyed into prisons and take appropriate action to a small number of prison staff who break the rules. Our £100m Security Investment Programme, aimed at reducing crime in prisons, including reducing the conveyance of illicit items such as drugs and mobile phones, is ongoing. This includes increased resource to pursue corruption, as well as established a new ‘Prevent’ function, aimed at building staff resilience against corruption.

Below is a table showing the breakdown of staff investigated from July 23 to Dec 2023 relating to the conveyance of drugs.

Table 1

Below is a table showing the breakdown of staff arrested from 2019 to Dec 2023 to date relating to the conveyance of drugs.

Table 2

Below is a table showing the breakdown of staff charged from 2019 to Dec 2023 to date relating to the conveyance of drugs.

Table 3

Source: Linkspace Case Management System.

Notes:

Linkspace is the Counter Corruption Unit’s (CCU) Case Management System used to record and track cases linked to corruption.

Data provided by the Counter Corruption (CCU) have the following Caveats applied below;

1) The new Counter Corruption Unit came into being in April 2019, with a new structure and a change to ways of working. During the initial transition period, and prior to the introduction of the new Case Management System, it is possible that not all arrests were being captured.

2) Prior to April 2019, corruption in HMPPS was managed by the Corruption Prevention Unit

(CPU). The CPU was a largely centralised unit focused on sanitising and disseminating all

corruption related intelligence to the Police, with an individual Regional Corruption

Prevention Manager (RCPM) in each geographical region offering advice and support to

prisons in managing corruption, Hence data prior to April 2019 is not available.

3) Data includes Non-Directly Employed Staff (public or private) as they provide a service on behalf of HMPPS.

4) Officers ‘charged*’ is not an assured metric, the data below is likely very underrepresented given it is substantially lower than our CJS outcomes i.e., CJS sentences, court fines, conditional discharges etc over this period.

5) The Investigations data is all operations opened on linkspace that relate to conveyance of drugs, for officers and non-officers. Some investigations are based off limited intelligence and many are unproven.