Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether his Department has made an estimate of the number of instances of prisoners bring transferred from prison to court late in the last 12 months.

In the 12 months to 30 September, 134,536 prisoners were escorted to court from prison, 99.8% of whom were delivered on time by the Prisoner Escort and Custody Service (PECS) contractors. There were 2151 reported instances of delayed arrival in court. Of these, 832 (39%) were attributable to delays at the prison, and 1119 to the PECS contractor (in 814 of the PECS cases, no resulting trial delay was reported). The remaining 200 reported instances are attributable to wider system issues.