§ Mr. Andrew TurnerTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) how many Prison Service pay queries have been outstanding at the end of each month since July 2001; [55729]
(2) how many Prison Service personnel have been (a) incorrectly paid and (b) unpaid following the implementation of Payfact. [55728]
§ Beverley Hughes[holding answer 13 May 2002]: Payment of Prison Service personnel is handled by the Home Office Pay and Pensions Service. This service operates 28 payrolls for 69,000 employees. Of these over 40,000 are in the Prison Service. Up until now, the Pay Service has not kept figures for the number of Prison Service pay queries outstanding at the end of each month. However, ways of measuring the number of pay queries on a month by month basis are currently being developed and therefore this information will be available in the future.
Pay Service's priority must be to concentrate on paying personnel correctly, accounting for the disbursement of funds from the payroll and providing financial management information. Pay Service does not retain statistics specifically related to the number of people paid incorrectly or unpaid each month. However, the feasibility of doing so is currently being examined. It does retain statistics for the number of payments made outside payday, both for manually calculated payments and those made through the Payfact system. The figures provide a good indicator of where there are problems. The figures include the numbers of advances of overtime requested by individuals and advances of salary for new entrants; as 266W such, they cannot he used to indicate the number of personnel who have been unpaid or paid incorrectly each month.
Month Number of prison service personnel Combined total of manual payments and advances 2001 July1 45,024 219 August 46,943 588 September 45,074 953 October 45,551 780 November 46,358 1,185 December 44,870 737 2002 January 45,148 648 February 45,609 1,001 March 45,408 636 1 Date from when Payfact went live.