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Private Prisons

Volume 457: debated on Monday 19 February 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many assaults there were on (a) staff and (b) prisoners at each private prison in 2005-06. (117569)

The information is provided in the following table.

1 January 2005-31 December 20051 January 2006-31 December 2006

Prison

Number of assaults on staff

Number of assaults on prisoners

Number of assaults on staff

Number of assaults on prisoners

Altcourse

44

200

36

199

Ashfield

153

501

129

625

Bronzefield

85

95

76

115

Doncaster

24

96

46

145

Dovegate

35

69

58

66

Forest Bank

82

431

50

344

Lowdham Grange

16

37

34

74

Parc

41

229

48

245

Peterborough

72

104

137

226

Rye Hill

65

53

48

61

Wolds

3

23

8

34

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether any private prison has been refinanced by a holding or partner company. (117570)

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many unfilled posts there were in the Prison Service in (a) public and (b) private prisons in each of the last 12 months. (117572)

The number of unfilled posts for the last five quarters is shown in the following tables. These figures include all posts, both operational and non-operational, across the whole Prison Service. For the public sector they reflect the impact of additional hours worked through contracted supplementary hours and agency staffing. The number of unfilled posts represent around 3 per cent. of all posts.

Public sector

Date1

Shortfall on staffing requirement having included CSH and agency staff2

31 December 2005

1,335

31 March 2006

1,534

30 June 2006

1,463

30 September 2006

1,228

31 December 2006

1,480

1 Staffing requirements are centrally reported quarterly and therefore the number of unfilled posts is only available for the end of each quarter.

2 Information has been derived from the Personnel Corporate Database, Oracle HRMS and Quarterly Forecast Change Forms completed by each establishment. Where an establishment has recorded a surplus of staff this has not been used to off-set shortfalls of others.

Private prisons

Shortfall on staffing requirement1

January

181

February

177

March

206

April

190

May

186

June

146

July

155

August

182

September

181

October

187

November

181

December

198

1 Private prisons information has been obtained from the Home Office, on behalf of Serco, GSL, G4S, and KALYX human resources databases.