HC Deb 12 July 1999 vol 335 cc77-8W
Mr. McNamara

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what are the principal functions of the Local Inmates Database System; how many records the system contains; under what fields information is recorded about inmates; what would be the cost of adding an extra field to this system; how many fields would be required to monitor the ethnic composition of the prison population along the lines of the proposed questions for Census 2001; and what arrangements are in place to link information on inmates detained elsewhere in the United Kingdom. [89907]

Mr. George Howarth

The Local Inmates Database System (LIDS) operates at each public prison to support the administration of prisoners' sentences. It covers a wide range of administrative functions including the recording of all movements of prisoners including: reception, transfers to and from courts, adjudications while in prisons; details of prisoners earnings and private cash; related work and activities; and all forms of release. It holds a broad set of information needed to support these processes, much of which is transferred to a separate central system which supports overall management and monitoring of the Prison Service. LIDS records are transferred automatically between prisons in England and Wales when prisoners move location.

The individual prison LIDS systems hold full details of all current prisoners and those who have recently been released. The total number of records held, therefore, varies according to the size of the overall prison population but is generally some 20,000 to 30,000 above this.

In addition to standard fields such as name, date of birth, place of birth, the system holds several hundred fields supporting the functionality described. The cost of adding an additional field to the system is heavily dependent on the extent to which the change can be combined with other activity, whether it warrants significant staff training or needs complex programming.

LIDS already has fields which hold details of ethnic origin, country of birth and place of birth. The coding system used for these fields is not identical to that proposed for the Census in 2001 but could be adapted for that purpose.

There are no arrangements in place to link LIDS data with similar systems maintained by other jurisdictions.