Prisoners (Hansard, 14 April 1993)

§ Ms Ruddock
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what steps he has taken to implement the recommendation in the Woolf report that there should be a new prison rule that no establishment should hold prisoners in excess of its certified normal accommodation; and if he will make a statement.

§ Mr. Peter Lloyd
Responsibility for this matter has been delegated to the Director General of the prison service. I have asked him to arrange for a reply to be given.
Letter from Derek Lewis to Ms Joan Ruddock, dated 14 April 1993:
The Home Secretary has asked me to write to you in response to your Parliamentary Question, for priority written answer on 14 April, on the implementation of the Woolf report recommendation on overcrowding.
The recommendation was for there to be a Prison Rule that no establishment should hold more prisoners than is 616W provided for in its certified normal level of accommodation, with provision for Parliament to be informed if exceptionally there is to be a material departure from that rule. It was decided however that it would not be practicable to operate such a system at this stage. Instead the Prison Service has improved the overcrowding information provided for Parliament (see annexes 4 and 5 of the Report of the Work of the Prison Service April 1991-March 1992, cm 2087).
As the white paper on Custody, Care and Justice (cm 1647) explained, the Prison Service plans to provide an estate able to operate in equilibrium without particular prisons or areas suffering from overcrowding. A significant improvement in the situation has already taken place. There are at present nearly 3,000 vacancies in the estate as a whole. Overcrowding is now largely confined to the older local prisons and remand centres and further expansion of this part of the estate is planned. In addition the actual level of overcrowding being experienced has been greatly reduced in recent years. The Prison Service's business plan also includes a commitment to end trebling in cells by the end of March 1994.

§ Ms Ruddock
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many(a) Indian, (b) Pakistani, (c) Bangladeshi, (d) Afro-Caribbean and (e) other ethnic minority people were (i) on remand and (ii) sentenced in each prison in March; and how many in each case were (x) men and (y) women.

§ Mr. Peter Lloyd
Responsibility for this matter has been delegated to the Director General of the prison service. I have asked him to arrange for a reply to be given.
Letter from Derek Lewis to Ms Joan Ruddock, dated 14 April 1993.
I have been asked to reply to your question about numbers of unconvicted and convicted men and women in our prisons broken down by nationality.
The latest available provisional figures are for 28 February and arc given in the table which has been placed in the Library.