asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department what encouragement he is giving to prisoners in Her Majesty's prisons to study painting and other allied activities and to exhibit or sell their work to the general public.

Painting and other allied activities, mainly recreational but with opportunities in individual cases for formal study, are encouraged in prison education programmes. Selected work may be publicly displayed and sold in the annual Koestler Exhibition and in local exhibitions.

asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many people were in prison in England during each of the past 10 years for which figures are available; and how the actual figures in the past few years compare with those projected in the 8th Report of the Expenditure Committee 1971–72.

The information available is as follows:

Average Daily Population in Prison Establishments, England and Wales, 1966–75
Year			Total
1966–67	…	…	34,021
1967–68	…	…	35,071
1968–69	…	…	32,502
1969–70	…	…	35,671
1970–71	…	…	39,723
1971–72	…	…	39,281
1972–73	…	…	38,142
1973–74	…	…	36,425
1974–75	…	…	37,531
1975–76	…	…	40,343

The decline in the prison population in England and Wales noted by the Select Committee in 1972 continued throughout 1973 since when the numbers in prison have increased broadly in line with the upward trend from 1950 and departmental projections reflected in annual White Papers on Public Expenditure.