Asked by: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what investigation HM Prison and Probation Service has carried out into the causes of the hospitalisation of (a) prison staff and (b) prisoners at HMP Lewes on 28 March 2024.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
On 28 March, following a Maundy Thursday service and meal in the prison chapel at HMP Lewes, two people who were present collapsed and were taken to hospital. After others who had attended the service also reported feeling unwell, the 32 prisoners and six staff who had attended were checked by paramedics. In total, six people required hospital treatment. The police are conducting an investigation into the incident. His Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service is continuing to engage with them and to obtain regular updates on the investigation.
Asked by: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 18 April 2024 to Question 21066 on Prisons: Civil Disorder, how may Tornado trained officers each prison should aim to have trained.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Operation Tornado is a national mutual aid plan by which prisons support one another in the event of a serious incident or occurrence requiring a reinforcement of staff. Operation Tornado is employed by HMPPS for three main reasons:
HMPPS aims to have 2,100 volunteers trained in readiness for Operation Tornado. Since the inception of Operation Tornado in the late 1980s, HMPPS has allocated a commitment to each prison for how many Tornado staff they should have trained. HMPPS monitors the number of staff available for deployment and offer training spaces to ensure resilience to respond to serious incidents.
In the event of a serious incident, all prisons, including those who have a commitment of zero, receive the same level of support from the Operation Response and Resilience Unit and Tornado trained staff from other prisons if required.
The requested information is in the table attached.
Asked by: Marsha De Cordova (Labour - Battersea)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an assessment of the reasons for which some Just Stop Oil protestors who were under the age of 18 were held on remand in adult prisons.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Custody should always be a last resort for children, including on remand. The Government raised the legal test for remanding a child to custody in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. A child must have committed a violent or sexual offence or have been charged with an offence where an adult may receive a custodial sentence of 14 years, and the court must consider it very likely that the child will receive a custodial sentence.
Any person under the age of 18 will not be remanded in an adult prison. Instead, they are remanded into Young Offender Institutions (YOIs), a Secure Training Centre (STC), or Secure Children’s Homes (SCHs). Specific placement decisions for custodial remands are made by the Youth Custody Service (YCS), factoring in the needs of the child.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to ensure that (a) educational and (b) vocational training opportunities are not reduced in prisons; and whether he plans to use those training opportunities to help reduce prison overcrowding.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Education is key for reducing reoffending and research indicates that prison education reduces reoffending by 9 percentage points. In September 2023, we set out our plans to deliver an improved Prison Education Service that will support more prisoners to improve their literacy and numeracy and increase the number of prison leavers employed on release.
Over the past 12 months we have seen a sustained delivery in the number vocational courses undertaken by prisoners following increases to 95,000. To ensure the right education and vocational training opportunities are available across prisons we have:
I am pleased to say that we have seen positive outcomes in employment in support of our work to make best use of prison capacity. The proportion of prison leavers in employment six months after release has more than doubled in the two years to March 2023, from 14% to over 30%and between 2011/12 and 2021/22, the overall proven reoffending rate has decreased from 31.3% to 25.2%.
Asked by: Lord Blunkett (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what specific budget is allocated for the implementation of the current Imprisonment for Public Protection action plan.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
HM Prison and Probation Service is using existing resources to deliver the requirements of the IPP Action Plan, ensuring that it is used to best effect to support those serving IPP sentences to achieve their sentence plan objectives and reduce their risks. HMPPS does not allocate funding in such a way as it would be possible to disaggregate specific amounts dedicated to sentence planning, offender management and support for IPP offenders.
Unto that end, the Action Plan focuses on ensuring offenders can access the required services or interventions in order to take positive steps towards a future release, a sustainable life in the community and, ultimately, the end of their sentence altogether. Further, when it comes to those serving the IPP sentence in prison, the Action Plan requires that they have an up to date sentence plan and are held in a prison which provides the intervention(s) specified in the sentence plan. It is expected that the latest IPP Annual Report and Action Plan will be published in mid-May.
We have taken significant action through the Victims and Prisoners Bill to curtail IPP licence periods to give offenders the opportunity to move on with their lives. In addition to these changes, the actions this Government is taking are working; the number of prisoners serving the IPP sentence who have never been released now stands at 1,180 as of 31 March 2024, down from more than 6,000 in 2012.
Asked by: Lord Rogan (Ulster Unionist Party - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many super-injunctions are currently in effect in England and Wales.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
There is currently one super-injunction in force which was made in the Kings Bench Division of the High Court.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to manage prison population levels.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
We continue to focus on the prison capacity challenge.
To meet rising demand, we are building c.20,000 modern, rehabilitative prison places – the biggest prison build programme since the Victorian era. We have already delivered c.5,900 of these, including through our two new 1,700 places prisons, HMP Five Wells and HMP Fosse Way, and c.590 Rapid Deployment Cells across 11 sites. By the end of 2025, we are on track to have delivered around 10,000 places in total.
On 11 March, I announced the next steps in our plan, to allow us to go further and faster in removing FNOs. This includes expediting prisoner transfers with our priority partners such as Albania and the creation of a new taskforce across the HO and MoJ to change the way we process FNO cases radically.
We have also put in place short-term measures across the prison estate to expand useable capacity, while ensuring our prisons remain safe for staff and offenders.
The Government will continue to monitor the evolving situation with demand for prison places carefully, so that we can make sure we have the right approaches in place to maintain the capacity required for a safe and effective criminal justice system.
Asked by: Emily Thornberry (Labour - Islington South and Finsbury)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the contract agreed by his Department with ZK Analytics Limited on 18 March 2024, procurement reference 23425, if he will publish the deliverables specified in Annex F of that contract.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
A redacted copy of Annex F – Deliverables will be uploaded to Contracts Finder within the next 10 days.
Asked by: Helen Morgan (Liberal Democrat - North Shropshire)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to help support victims of historic miscarriages of justice to appeal their convictions.
Answered by Laura Farris - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Ministry of Justice) (jointly with Home Office)
Where the normal time limit for appeals through the courts has passed and where an individual believes they have been wrongly convicted of a crime in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, including in historic cases, they can apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) which is an independent public body funded by the Ministry of Justice. The CCRC can investigate and where it considers that there is a real possibility that the conviction would not be upheld were the reference to be made, can refer cases back to the courts.
There is no time limit on any application and the service is free.
To ensure that the appeals system is working effectively, the Government has asked the Law Commission to conduct an independent and wide-ranging Review of the appeals system. The Review will consider the issues raised by the Westminster Commission (2021) on miscarriages of justice, which includes the tests used by the CCRC and the Court of Appeal, and the government will then consider the review’s findings, and any recommendations for change in the law, very carefully.
Asked by: Helen Morgan (Liberal Democrat - North Shropshire)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of cases referred by the Criminal Cases Review Commission for appeal were successful in each year since 2019.
Answered by Laura Farris - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Ministry of Justice) (jointly with Home Office)
The number and proportion of successful cases referred by the CCRC and heard by appeal courts each year since 2019/20 is:
| Number of successful referrals | Proportion of successful referrals |
2019/20 | 10 | 58.8% |
2020/21 | 30 | 88% |
2021/22 | 57 | 88% |
2022/23 | 17 | 89% |
2023/24 | 19 | 79% |
2024/25 (year to date) | 2 | 100% |