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Prisons: Mobile Phones

Volume 506: debated on Tuesday 23 February 2010

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice (1) what progress he has made in (a) trialling and (b) evaluating disruption technologies for mobile telephones in prisons; (318054)

(2) in which prisons mobile telephone signal blockers are in operation.

The National Offender Management Service is trialling a variety of technologies in a number of establishments in support of our strategy to minimise the number of mobile phones entering prisons; find mobile phones that are smuggled into prisons; and disrupt mobile phones that we cannot find. For security reasons, it is not appropriate to disclose the location of these trials.

This is a challenging area of work where we are working closely with mobile network operators and Ofcom where appropriate to ensure full evaluation of the pilots.