§ Miss Richardsonasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department for the last 10 years how many (a) men and (b) women have been imprisoned for default on maintenance payments; what details he has of the periods for which they have been (i) sentenced and (ii) actually in jail; what details he has of the amounts of default for which they have been jailed; and what has been the total cost of their imprisonment to public funds.
§ Mr. MayhewInformation on the number of receptions of persons committed by magistrates' courts to prison department establishments in England and Wales for non-payment of maintenance or affiliation orders is published annually in "Prison statistics, England and Wales". Table 6.2 of the issue for 1979, Cmnd. 7978, gives the figures for the years 1969 to 1979; figures for 1980 are not yet available. Information about the periods of imprisonment imposed by magistrates' courts on those committed to prison for non-payment of wife maintenance, the arrears involved and the time spent in custody is given in tables 6(a) and 6(b) of Cmnd. 7978. Information on the average cost of maintaining an inmate in custody in the financial year 1979–80 is published in appendix 6 of the "Report on the work of Prison Department 1980"—Cmnd. 8228; average costs are not available separately for different categories of prisoner.