§ Lord Marlesfordasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether there is a computerised record of the prison populations of Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively and if not when they expect to introduce one.
§ The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Fraser of Carmyllie)The Scottish Prison Service is developing a prisoner record system as part of its Information Systems Strategy. A contract for the application software was awarded earlier this month. The system will come on stream between December 1994 and July 1995.
Each prison in Northern Ireland maintains a computerised record of a range of information about its prisoner population. A limited centralised prisoner information database, manually updated from regular returns made by each prison, is maintained at Northern Ireland Prison Service Headquarters.
There are plans to develop an integrated communications network to enable headquarters to access each of the prisons' population record systems, but implementation is dependent on the availability of resources.