Category: Speeches

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-04-29.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much has been spent maintaining the closed wings at HM Prison Hull and HM Prison Chelmsford to date.

Jeremy Wright

We will always have enough prison places for those sent to us by the courts and continue to modernise the prison estate so that it delivers best value for the taxpayer

This Government has a long term strategy for managing the prison estate. We will have increased the adult male prison capacity so that we have more places than we inherited from the previous Government.

The retention of significant spare prison capacity over and above what is required is expensive and cannot be justified given the current financial climate. The mothballing of spare capacity at HM Prisons Chelmsford and Hull saved the taxpayer £3.6m in the financial year 2013-14. This compares to the significantly lower cost of maintaining this accommodation on a mothballed basis, so that it could be reactivated if necessary.

We have reviewed the refurbishment requirements at both sites and believe that, with minor investment, they can now be reopened on a contingency basis without carrying out a full refurbishment. These costs are anticipated to be around £132k by the time they have reopened. From the end of March to date, around £12k has been spent on Chelmsford, and around £107k has been spent on Hull.

The indicative additional staffing requirement to reactivate the places at Hull is around 65 members of staff – of which approximately 40 are uniformed. The indicative additional staffing requirement to reactivate the places at Chelmsford is around 30 members of staff – of which approximately 20 are uniformed grades. This means we are able to create additional places at an average cost of £7k per place (subject to final benchmarking review), as opposed to the average cost of a prison per place of £26,139.

The staffing requirement will initially be met by short term detached duty from other prisons, before looking to redeploy staff permanently where surpluses exist – and if necessary through external recruitment.

Subject to certification, Hull will create 282 places and Chelmsford 148 places, with prisoners due to start arriving this summer.

The reactivation of these places is a prudent and good value for money response to an increased prison population. Under the previous administration, police and court cells were turned into temporary prisons, with over 50,000 prisoners held in these cells in 2007-08 alone.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-04-29.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many of (a) all people in prison and (b) all people in prison who self-identified as Muslims in 1 January 2014 were serving custodial sentences of less than (i) one month, (ii) three months, (iii) six months, (iv) 12 months, (v) 24 months, (vi) 60 months, (vii) 10 years and (viii) over 10 years.

Jeremy Wright

Data are held centrally on the prison population in England and Wales on the last day of each month, so figures have been provided for 31^st December 2013 (with the exception of PQ 197068 which has been answered as at 30 June 2013 – the latest available data for criminal history information).

For PQ 197067, Table 1 below provides the number for the sentenced prison population by sentence length for self-declared Muslim prisoners and the total for all religions.

For PQ 197068, Table 2 provides the number of offenders in prison on 30th June 2013 who identified themselves as Muslim and all other religions by the number of previous custodial sentences received.

For PQ 197069, Table 3 provides the prison population by nationality for self-declared Muslims and the total for all other religions.

For PQ 197090, Table 4 provides the prison population by age group for self-declared Muslims and the total for all other religions.

Please note that the religion of prisoners is self declared and prisoners are under no obligation to declare their religion.

These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.