Prisons: Coronavirus

(asked on 21st 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 minutes prisoners have spent on calls to date (1) in total, and (2) in each prison in which such phones have been allocated.


Answered by
 Portrait
Lord Keen of Elie
This question was answered on 4th August 2020

In recognition of the importance of maintaining family ties, since 24 March the Government has rolled out 1297 secure mobile phones across the prison estate in England and Wales. This is in addition to existing wing phones and in-cell telephones. As of the 21 July 2020, 153,918 minutes of calls have taken place from secure mobile PIN phones since 2nd April when this service was deployed.

We do not routinely record the number of calls that take place over long periods of time, however our most recent data shows that on 21 July, 2803 calls took place across all mobile phones. This equates to 14,783 minutes across the estate. For comparison, 222,889 minutes of calls took place across the non-mobile based PIN network. There has been a 52% increase in calls across pin phone calls from the average call number in February, we do not currently have the equivalent data for just mobile phones.

We do not record figures for minutes that prisoners have spent on calls by prison across the time period mentioned.. We have access to daily call figures across the entire secure mobile network and also individual prison figures on a given day. We are working with our supplier to identify whether we can report on cumulative figures for individual prisons.

Reticulating Splines