Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what recent estimate he has made of the number of prisoners which undertake meaningful work; and in what types of jobs.
Crispin Blunt (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Prisons and Probation), Justice; Reigate, Conservative)
Our latest estimate is that about 9,000 prisoners per day currently work in NOMS public sector prison industries in over 400 workshops, representing a wide range of activities including printing, furniture, textile manufacturing, laundries, engineering, contract services and land based activities.
Prisons also partly run on prison labour. These activities include about 4,400 prisoners working in catering and picking and packing services. In addition significant numbers of prisoners are involved in areas such as cleaning but, as these jobs are local to each prison, numbers are not collated centrally.