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The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-01-27.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers have taken up the voluntary early departure scheme in each month since May 2010; how much has been paid in severance in each month to those prison officers; what average amount is paid in severance to those prison officers; and what the average continuous service was of those prison officers.

Andrew Selous

Information on the number of prison officers taking voluntary early departure has been published in PQ 25478. The total and average amount of severance they received and their average length of service in each month since May 2010 is contained in the table below. The severance amounts in the table relate to the payments made to the officers who left during the particular month and may not reflect the actual date that the money was received. For this reason the information will not match with accounting records.

All prison officers who left on voluntary early departure had at least 24 months continuous service.

Voluntary exit was used in the last Parliament as a result of the closure of uneconomic prison places. These prison closures and benchmarking reforms have delivered savings of £300 million a year, with the average cost per prison place falling in real terms by 19% since 2009/10.

Prison Officers Taking VEDS, May 2010 to September 2015

Year	Month	VEDS Leavers	Total Severance Received (£)	Average Severance Received (£)	Average Length of Service of VEDS leavers (Years)
2010	May	~	~	~	~
	June	~	~	~	~
	July	~	~	~	~
	August	70	£2,132,290	£29,209	17.6
	September	~	~	~	~
	October	~	~	~	~
	November	~	~	~	~
	December	~	~	~	~
2011	January	~	~	~	~
	February	~	~	~	~
	March	~	~	~	~
	April	30	£1,108,573	£38,227	17.1
	May	~	~	~	~
	June	~	~	~	~
	July	~	~	~	~
	August	~	~	~	~
	September	~	~	~	~
	October	20	£617,345	£38,584	22.7
	November	~	~	~	~
	December	10	£360,949	£36,095	21.8
2012	January	~	~	~	~
	February	~	~	~	~
	March	~	~	~	~
	April	~	~	~	~
	May	~	~	~	~
	June	~	~	~	~
	July	~	~	~	~
	August	30	£1,257,194	£41,906	21.1
	September	~	~	~	~
	October	~	~	~	~
	November	~	~	~	~
	December	40	£1,121,641	£30,315	14.6
2013	January	~	~	~	~
	February	~	~	~	~
	March	180	£6,204,024	£33,718	19.5
	April	~	~	~	~
	May	~	~	~	~
	June	180	£6,353,177	£35,100	20.3
	July	170	£7,010,396	£40,290	19.7
	August	~	~	~	~
	September	720	£25,920,953	£35,802	18.9
	October	130	£4,964,209	£37,608	20.8
	November	~	~	~	~
	December	40	£1,298,680	£29,515	17.2
2014	January	100	£3,152,467	£32,838	20.0
	February	10	£425,167	£38,652	24.5
	March	30	£1,308,937	£39,665	19.8
	April	~	~	~	~
	May	~	~	~	~
	June	~	~	~	~
	July	~	~	~	~
	August	~	~	~	~
	September	~	~	~	~
	October	~	~	~	~
	November	~	~	~	~
	December	~	~	~	~
2015	January	~	~	~	~
	February	~	~	~	~
	March	~	~	~	~
	April	~	~	~	~
	May	~	~	~	~
	June	~	~	~	~
	July	~	~	~	~
	August	~	~	~	~
	September	~	~	~	~

Notes:

All figures are rounded to the nearest 10, with numbers ending in 5 rounded to the nearest multiple of 20 to prevent systematic bias. As with all HR databases, extracts are taken at a fixed point in time, to ensure consistency of reporting. However the database itself is dynamic, and where updates to the database are made late, subsequent to the taking of the extract, these updates will not be reflected in figures produced by the extract. For this reason, HR data are unlikely to be precisely accurate, and to present unrounded figures would be to overstate the accuracy of the figures. Rounding to 10 accurately depicts the level of certainty that is held with these figures.

~ denotes suppressed values of 5 or fewer or calculations based on a population of 5 or fewer. Low numbers are suppressed, in conjunction with the rounding policy to prevent disclosure in accordance with the Data Protection Act, 1998.

Information in the table relates to cases of voluntary exits where payment information is available. In a small number of cases information on severance payments does not reflect the reason for leaving held on the central reporting system and may vary slightly from leavers figures published from that source in the NOMS Workforce Bulletin.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-01-27.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many knives have been confiscated in prisons in each year since 2010.

Andrew Selous

Historic data on estimates of the number of knives confiscated in prisons is not collected in a form that can be assured to be of sufficient quality for publication. A new enhanced incident reporting system has recently been introduced which does collect this data and assured data will be available at the end of the year.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-01-27.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoner officers who have received severance or redundancy packages since May 2010 have been re-employed as prison officers.

Andrew Selous

I refer the honourable member to the answer given to PQ 19304 on 7th March 2016.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-01-27.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many complaints on what subjects the Independent Monitoring Board of each prison received from prisoners in the last 12 months for which figures are available.

Andrew Selous

Independent Monitoring Boards are individual Arm’s Length Bodies, who publish this information on an establishment by establishment basis, each on a different annual cycle.

Information is available from the annual reports submitted by individual Independent Monitoring Boards, which are published on http://www.imb.org.uk/reports/2015-annual-reports/ There is a page towards the end of reports setting out the number of “applications” by prisoners to see the Independent Monitoring Board in that establishment.

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