§ Lord Aveburyasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether, in the light of the Prison's Ombudsman's finding in Case No. 10471/96 that at Pentonville the governor had failed to ensure that valid copies of Standing Orders were freely available in the Library for the information of both prisoners and staff, contrary to the provisions of Standing Order 7B, paragraph 32, and in view of the cost of paper and postage in distributing the frequent amendments to Standing Orders to every prison in England and Wales and the staff time necessary to ensure that the copies available are up to date, they will evaluate the use of the World Wide Web as a means of distribution of the Standing Orders and other prison documents that are in the public domain, as well as for confidential documents, using password protection.
§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Blatch)Responsibility for this matter has been delegated to the Director General of the Prison Service, who has been asked to arrange for a reply to be given.
112WALetter to Lord Avebury from the Director General of the Prison Service, Mr. Richard Tilt, dated 4th July 1996.
Lady Blatch has asked me to reply to your recent Question about Standing Orders on the World Wide Web.
Following the recommendations of the Woodcock report, the Prison Service has created an Information Management Unit (IMU) which is responsible for the distribution of all updates and new documents as well as a review of the way in which such information is published and distributed. The Prison Service has yet to consider how the Internet can be used for the distribution of public domain information but will be doing so in the near future.
All Prison Service establishments already have access to electronic mail facilities which provides both inter-and intra-organisational electronic mail by a connection to 'World Talk'. Negotiations are currently under way with Mercury over the provision of access to the Internet for electronic mail purposes by the World Talk gateway. It is expected that such access will be available within four months.
As you are aware, our policy on allowing prisoners computers in their cells is currently under review. No final decisions have yet been made, but it is most unlikely that prisoners will be allowed unsupervised access to the Internet, and this would limit the benefits associated with your suggestion. Additionally any savings that may be achieved from Internet access are very difficult to quantify.