§ Mr. CoxTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many official complaints have been made by prison inmates in England and Wales of racial discrimination being shown or used against them during each of the last three years.
§ Mr. Peter LloydResponsibility 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.
Letter from Mr. D. Lewis to Mr. Tom Cox, dated 26 July 1993:
The Home Secretary has asked me to reply to your recent question about the number of complaints of racial discrimination recorded over the last three years.Information is not held in the form requested. The request and complaints system does not record racial discrimination as a separate category, nor does it separate out requests from complaints.Governors are required to record all racial incidents and report them quarterly to Area Managers, and annually in aggregated statistical form. However, the definition of a racial incident goes wider than complaints of racial discrimination and includes, for example, incidents between prisoners and between staff. It is not therefore possible to separate out complaints of racial discrimination from the information available.