Prison Staff (Hansard, 17 May 1993)

§ Mr. Peter Lloyd

Responsibility for this matter has been delegated to the director general of the prison service. I have asked him to send a reply as quickly as possible.

67W

Letter from Derek Lewis to Ms Joan Ruddock, dated 7 May 1993: I am writing to supply the further information promised in Mr. Lloyd's reply of 14 April to your Question about the ethnic background of Prison Service staff. As our statement of Purpose, Vision, Goals and Values makes clear, equality of opportunity is central to the work of the Prison Service. We are committed to ethnic monitoring as a means of measuring whether our policies are achieving greater equality of opportunity for all staff are having any effect. We need to be able to measure whether all staff have equal access to opportunities for promotion, training and career development and, to do this, we first need to create a comprehensive database of staff ethnic backgrounds. The first stage of this process was a voluntary survey of all staff in the non-industrial grades in directly managed prisons. Initially, our database held records of the ethnic origins of only 43‥ of staff and now, after the voluntary survey, that figure has risen to 74‥. Over the next few months we shall be taking further steps to fill the gaps in our database. The table below is drawn from the results of that voluntary survey. It sets out the numbers of staff in the unified (prison officer, senior officer and principal officer) and governor grades in directly managed prisons and have recorded their ethnic origin as other than white. The categories shown are those used in the survey.

	Unified grades	Governor grades
	Male	Female	Male	Female
Caribbean	67	30	0	0
African	39	9	0	0
Black of other origin	32	2	1	0
Indian	40	2	1	0
Pakistani	12	1	1	0
Bangladeshi	18	0	0	0
East African	9	0	0	0
Chinese	10	2	1	0
Asian of other origin	15	2	0	0
Other ethnic groups	92	5	1	0
Total staff recording their ethnic origin as other than white	334	53	5	0
Total staff in grade	20,568	1,979	903	90

You will see that there are five members of the governor grades who have recorded their ethnic origins as other than white. I am aware that, in response to an earlier Parliamentary Question, you were informed that there were no staff in the governor grades who had recorded their ethnic origins as other than white. This was due to an error on our computer records, which has now been corrected.

In the contracted sector, I understand that at Wolds Prison, there are two prison custody officers from the ethnic minorities; one female prison custody officer who is, according to the categories used in our survey, Asian of other origin and one male prison custody officer who is of another ethnic group.