Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, What assessment his Department has made of the appropriate ratio of staff to prisoners in each prison for operating a safe and rehabilitative prison regime.

There are arrangements in place in every prison, taking into account population and accommodation, to set staffing levels which are sufficient to maintain safe and decent conditions.

We are significantly increasing staff numbers by recruiting a net 2,500 extra prison officers by December 2018.

This will allow us to introduce a new key worker role, in which all prison officers on wings will support a small caseload of prisoners, improving the quality of staff-prisoner relationships and tackling the drivers of each prisoner’s offending.