Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government what information they hold on whether prison adjudication procedures and penalties are used differentially for prisoners from different ethnic groups; and what assessment they have made of any disparities identified.

The Adjudications Policy Framework must operate in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 and seek to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation.

The information on the proportion of prisoners in each ethnic group who were subject to an adjudication is not centrally held. Providing a robust and meaningful assessment of the distribution of adjudications across ethnic groups among all prisoners held during this period would require development of new analysis across multiple datasets and the information requested could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

However, regular statistics are published on adjudication outcomes, broken down by ethnicity, in our quarterly Offender Management Statistics. These figures relate to the number of adjudication outcomes, rather than the number of individual prisoners who received an adjudication: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/offender-management-statistics-quarterly. Information on the representation of different ethnic groups within the prison population is also regularly published within this release, for context to these statistics.