Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government (1) how many, and (2) what proportion, of prisoners’ complaints about (a) racism, or (b) racial discrimination, were upheld in each of the last 10 years by ethnicity.

All prisons are required to comply with the Prisoner complaints policy framework. This framework sets out requirements and information on providing a fair and effective system for dealing with prisoner complaints, including by ensuring procedural justice and taking a problem-solving approach for both adult prisoners and young people.

Separate to the Complaints procedure, a prisoner can submit a Discrimination Incident Reporting Form (DIRF) if they feel they have been discriminated against any of the protected characteristics, as defined by the Equality Act 2010. The DIRF process has been renewed to be launched in early 2022. As part of the updated process, and following a pilot in 2021, data will be collated regionally and nationally.

Until then, to confirm the number of racial complaints made by prisoners and which were upheld, a search of each prison’s complaints log would be required. The information requested could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.