The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-04-08.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many items were borrowed from prison libraries in each year from 2010 to 2013.
Jeremy Wright
The requested information is not held centrally and would need to be collated through enquiries at each prison in England and Wales. This would incur disproportionate cost.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-04-29.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the days staffing levels were against the (a) benchmark and (b) baseline staffing level at the time of the disturbance of HM Prison Northumberland on Saturday 29 March 2014.
Jeremy Wright
The information requested could not be obtained within the timescale. I will write to the Member in due course.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-04-29.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, when the re-opened wings at (a) HM Prison Hull and (b) HM Prison Chelmsford will take prisoners.
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, pursuant to the Answer of 10 April 2014, Official Report, column 406W, on prisons: postal services, how many incidents of (a) drug-related or (b) miscellaneous contraband were found in post received by prisoners in (a) 2010, (b) 2011, (c) 2012 and (d) 2013.
Jeremy Wright
All finds of contraband, whether found in post or otherwise, are recorded on a central incident reporting system under the drug-related or the miscellaneous incident categories. In order to establish the number of occasions, in each of the last four years, where contraband had been found in post sent to prisoners, would require the examination of over 62,000 individual electronic incident files. This could only be achieved at disproportionate cost.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-05-02.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many UK citizens returned from abroad to complete their custodial sentences in prisons in England and Wales in each of the last four years.
Jeremy Wright
It has not been possible to obtain this information. I will write to the Right Honourable member in due course.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-06-13.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many agency workers have been employed as cover for uniform operational support staff in each month since January 2014.
Andrew Selous
Since April 2010 we have cut our overall spend on temporary staff by £35.5m. We only use temporary staff to fill business-critical posts and essential frontline services where they can provide a fast, flexible and efficient way to obtain necessary skills that are not currently available in-house. We will continue to examine our use of contractors and look for further reductions.
In responding to each question we have utilised data provided by our contracted supplier of temporary clerical staff and contracted supplier of temporary operational staff. As the data provided has been supplied by two different third parties there is a slight difference in the way that the answer to question 3 and 4 has been presented.
Temporary operational staff relate to Operational Support Grades (OSGs) used within HM Prison Service. We have contracts in place to provide temporary OSGs to fill in gaps in requirements, for building projects or to fill vacancies short term. Temporary OSGs are a very small proportion of our staff complement.
Uniform operational support staff are Operational Support Grades (OSGs).These are uniformed staff who undertake a wide range of duties in prisons, for example operating prison gates, working in security and managing stores areas. They also escort contractors and their vehicles.
1) The following amounts (exclusive of VAT) have been spent on clerical agency staff across –
January 2014 – £2,983,633.14 (5 week period)
February 2014 – £2,613,023.10 (4 week period)
March 2014 – £2,591,678.87 (4 week period)
April 2014 – £2,900,742.70 (5 week period)
May 2014 – £2,398,053.57 (4 week period)
June 2014 – £658,700.28 (1 week period)
2) The following amounts (exclusive of VAT) have been spent on uniform operational support staff –
January 2014 – £1,082,247 (5 week period)
February 2014 – £1,420,329 (4 week period)
March 2014 – £1,137,834 (4 week period)
April 2014 – £1,249,908 (4 week period)
May 2014 – £2,282,468 (5 week period)
The spend for May 2014 also includes the backdated annual pay rise for eligible workers from 1st April 2014.
3) The following number of clerical agency staff have been utilised –
January 2014 – 1571 (Average headcount)
February 2014 – 1634 (Average headcount)
March 2014 – 1624 (Average headcount)
April 2014 – 1578 (Average headcount)
May 2014 – 1644 (Average headcount)
June 2014 – 1674 (Average headcount)
4) The following number of uniform operational support staff have been utilised –
January 2014 – 697 (Peak worker number)
February 2014 – 845 (Peak worker number)
March 2014 – 867 (Peak worker number)
April 2014 – 853 (Peak worker number)
May 2014 – 855 (Peak worker number)
June 2014 – Peak worker number not available yet.
The comments made by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, on 30 October 2022.
Since I was elected Mayor, around 13,500 people have been helped off our capital’s streets with eight in ten staying off the streets for good. Our outreach workers, charity teams, healthcare professionals and council staff are not only vital partners in this work but unsung heroes and deserve our heartfelt gratitude.
Despite this progress, extraordinary financial pressures are putting the poorest Londoners at growing risk of homelessness with the number of people sleeping rough already up by a fifth year on year. We continue to see a revolving door of people ending up homeless as a result of this escalating cost of living crisis.
This cannot be allowed to continue, this new Government must act now to prevent the circumstances that lead to people sleeping rough before thousands more are forced to face a winter on the streets.
The comments made by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, on Twitter on 20 October 2022.
The UK used to be a beacon of strength and stability across the globe.
The Tories have turned us into a laughing stock and diminished our country in the eyes of the world.
We need a general election now.
The comments made by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, on Twitter on 20 October 2022.
General election, now.
Our city and country has never needed a Labour government more.
The statement made by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, on 17 October 2022.
When I asked the Met to establish this independent review a year ago following a series of shocking scandals involving serving police officers, I was concerned that a serious cultural problem had developed within the Met which was allowing racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour to be downplayed or left unchallenged. The interim findings of this review not only confirm my concerns, but reveal a situation even worse than feared.
It’s clear the Met’s misconduct system is simply not fit for purpose. I now expect nothing less than every single recommendation of this review to be implemented in full, and quickly. All misconduct allegations must be acted upon, cases must be resolved much faster and the disproportionality in the way allegations are dealt with must be eliminated. The majority of those serving in the Met will be appalled by these latest findings and the decent officers who want to speak out – who have clearly been let down for far too long – must be properly supported.
As Mayor, I’ve ensured the Met is now set on a path of far-reaching systematic and cultural reform, with the appointment of a new Commissioner who acknowledges the scale of the problems within the Met. I want to assure Londoners that I will continue to hold the Met to account as I support Sir Mark in taking urgent action to reform the culture and systems of the Met and to root out all police officers found to be responsible for sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, bullying or harassment.