Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the impact of staff absences as a result of work-related stress in the (a) prison service and (b) probation service.

The management of, and support for, His Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) staff absent due to stress at work and other mental health related absences is a priority for the Prison & Probation Service.

The quarterly HMPPS workforce statistics publication covers staffing information, including the working days lost due to sickness absence.

Working days lost due to work-related stress within the Prison and Probation Service is shown in table 1 below.

Table 1: Staff absences due to work-related stress in the Prison Service¹ and Probation Service, 12 months to 30 June 2022.

Stress accounted for 13.2% of all sicknesses in the 12 months to 30 June 2022

1. Includes the Youth Custody Service (YCS) which was created in April 2017 to oversee day-to-day management of the under 18s young people’s estate. The Youth Custody Estate includes the following young offender institutions: Cookham Wood, Feltham, Werrington, and Wetherby. The YCS also initially included the Medway Secure Training Centre which closed in March 2020.

2. Average working days lost per member of staff is calculated as number of working days lost to sickness divided by the average number of full-time equivalent staff for a year.

3. In the quarter to Dec 2019, over 300 staff in Wales were transferred from privately run Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRC) to HMPPS, into the new ‘NPS Wales UM Transition’ and new Approved Premises teams created.

4. In late June 2021, more than 7,000 staff from private sector Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRC) came together with probation staff already in the public sector to form the new Probation Service.

HMPPS works hard to support workforce mental health and wellbeing. This includes a comprehensive Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), that provides the workforce access to confidential support & counselling services. This is in addition to the organisation’s Occupational Health Service that supports staff with medical advice and signposting, and part of HMPPS’ commitment to ensuring our staff feel supported in their roles.

Furthermore, Mental Health Allies (MHAs) have been put in place across HMPPS to support workforce mental health. MHAs provide confidential support to staff, provide reassurance and signposting, as well as raising awareness of mental health & challenge stigma surrounding mental ill health. The allies aim to signpost and increase awareness of various support routes for staff (i.e. EAP/Charity for Civil Servants etc).

HMPPS also recognise that our workforce undertake roles on the frontline and are have to deal with situations that can be traumatic. The Trauma Risk Management Service (TRiM) is a focused peer-to-peer support system operated by Prisons that aims provides support to staff who have experienced a traumatic incident.

HMPPS continuously manages its overall staffing level resources across the business taking into account a number of factors including staff sickness, as well as absence created for other reasons such as staff attendance at training.