Prisons: Coronavirus

(asked on 16th July 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to their announcement on 24 March that 900 secure phone handsets were to be provided to prisons to support family contact during the COVID-19 pandemic, how many calls have been placed to date (1) in total, and (2) in each prison that such phones have been allocated to.


Answered by
 Portrait
Lord Keen of Elie
This question was answered on 28th July 2020

As of the 14th July 132,266 connections through secure mobile PIN phones have been made. This number includes phone calls to approved telephone numbers, account check balances, failed calls and calls where they were connected to an engaged number and therefore disconnected. This number also excludes those calls made through existing in-cell telephones and secure PIN phones on prison landings.

Secure mobile phones were allocated on a region by region basis with operational decisions made as to where deployment of these phones was most effective. These decisions were made considering:

- whether in-cell telephones were already in place and so secure mobiles were not needed

- if the potential site had suitable mobile phone signal. Some sites, due to location and build of prison did not enable effective coverage to support mobile calls.

The following numbers of phones were initially deployed to each region across 65 sites:

Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire & Lancashire, Cumbria

120

Yorkshire

25

Tees & Wear

25

North Midlands

35

East Midlands

65

West Midlands

70

Avon & South Dorset

40

South Central

40

Devon & North Dorset

30

Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk & Hertfordshire, Essex and Suffolk

100

London

35

Kent, Surrey & Sussex

55

Long Term High Security

170

HMPPS Wales

90

Although all phone calls are monitored, we do not create reports on the number of calls on a person-by-person basis. Similarly, we do not routinely record how many times an individual makes a phone call. We have since increased the number of secure mobiles to nearly 1300.

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