Mary Glindon – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Mary Glindon on 2015-12-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many NOMS staff have been dismissed for corruption in each of the last five years.

Andrew Selous

The vast majority of NOMS staff undertake their duties with honesty and integrity. However, like all large organisations a minority of staff engage in corrupt activity. This is particularly challenging for NOMS given its role. We are committed to ensure that corruption will be investigated and eliminated to ensure prisons remain a safe and secure environment for staff, prisoners and visitors. Allegations against staff that are potentially criminal in nature are referred to the police for investigation.

A Corruption Prevention Unit delivers the key elements of the Agency’s corruption prevention strategy, including: detection, enforcement, training and support for staff. As part of this work NOMS collates records centrally of staff dismissed for offences which meet its definition of corruption.

The number of dismissals over the last five years of NOMS staff for corruption related offences has been provided in the table below.

Notes:

1. Data covers staff directly employed by NOMS and not contractor staff.
2. The information provided has been drawn from live administrative data systems which may be amended at any time. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system.