To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many prisoners were reported as requiring psychiatric care in each of the last five years. (148399)

The information requested is not held centrally.

A survey, “Psychiatric morbidity among prisoners in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics, 1998)” showed that 90 per cent. of prisoners have at least one significant mental health problem, including personality disorder, psychosis, neurosis, alcohol misuse and drug dependence. A copy is available in the Library.

People who are mentally too ill to remain in prison should be transferred to hospital. We have introduced tighter monitoring to identify prisoners waiting an unacceptably long period for transfer to hospital. A protocol was issued to prisons and primary care trusts in October 2005 setting out what must be done when a prisoner has been waiting for a hospital place for more than three months following acceptance by the national health service.

These measures have helped bring about positive results. In 2006, 962 prisoners, with mental illness too severe for prison, were transferred to hospital.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many prisoners were transferred to hospital for psychiatric care in each of the last five years; and what the average waiting time for the transfer was over that period. (148400)

The information requested on the numbers of prisons transferred is shown in the table.

Information on the average length of time prisoners wait for these transfers is not collected centrally. However, there has been a significant decrease in the number of people waiting over 12 weeks for a transfer in the quarter ending March 2007, 40 prisoners were waiting, down from 51 in the same quarter in 2005.