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18 July 2006 : Column 413W—continued
Passports (Secure Storage)
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what recent instructions he has issued to ensure that (a) passports and (b) other key documents are never left unsupervised and are always held in secure storage. [73704]
John Reid: Instructions were issued to all asylum staff in February of this year in relation to retaining documents. The relevant instruction is APN 02/2006 and can be found on the IND external website.
Police Stations
Mr. Pelling: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many holding cells there are in police stations in each London borough; and how many of these cells are closed for refurbishment. [84663]
Mr. McNulty: The provision and closure of cells are operational matters for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police, the Metropolitan Police Authority and the City of London.
Prisons
Mr. Andrew Turner: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many people who have been released on licence from each prison on the Isle of Wight are no longer in touch with the authorities monitoring their whereabouts. [67931]
Mr. Sutcliffe [holding answer 4 May 2006]: The information requested is not held centrally and to obtain it would incur disproportionate cost.
All offenders released on licence are subject to six standard licence conditions: three of which require them to ‘keep in touch with your supervising officer’, ‘permanently to reside at an address approved by your supervising officer’ and ‘notify him or her in advance of any proposed change of address or proposed stay (even for one night) away from that approved address’. In the event that any such licence conditions are breached, the offender is liable to be recalled to prison upon the recommendation of the probation officer in order to protect the public. Once the licence is revoked and the offender recalled, the police are notified, in order to ensure a swift return to custody.
Mr. Lidington: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many new places in (a) closed prisons and (b) young offender institutions his Department is planning to bring onstream during the 2006-07 financial year; and if he will make a statement. [74796]
Mr. Sutcliffe: 300 additional places in closed adult male establishments are planned for delivery in 2006-07 under the National Offender Management Service building programme.
In addition, the Youth Justice Board has commissioned and funded a 14-place juvenile unit at Her Majesty’s prison Foston Hall which will shortly be available for use.
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many foreign prisoners are detained in open prisons. [77121]
John Reid:
Towards the end of May 2006 there were around 300 prisoners in open prisons in England and Wales with a foreign nationality. The figures have been drawn from the prisons’ administrative IT systems.
Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system.
Foreign nationals are subject to the same risk assessment process as any other prisoner before allocation to open conditions. The overriding purpose of the security classification must be to ensure that prisoners are retained in custody with a level of security that is consistent with the need to protect the public. Following a review of the criteria for the categorisation of foreign national prisoners and their allocation to open conditions in May 2006, the Prison Service concluded that no changes were required of the policy. However, Governors have been instructed to take into account the impact of recent public statements regarding the likelihood of deportation on the risk of absconding when considering foreign national prisoners for Category D status and allocation to open conditions.
All life-sentenced foreign nationals and those sentenced for serious offences were returned from open conditions to closed during May and have been subject to an individual risk assessment in consultation with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate before a final decision as to whether or not they are suitable to return to open conditions.
Nick Herbert: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department pursuant to his answer of 8 June 2006, Official Report, column 819W, on prisons, what category of offences had been committed by each of the non-foreign national prisoners who absconded from Ford prison in 2006; what the term of the prison sentence was in each case; on what date each escaped; and whether the prisoner remains at large in each case. [77859]
Mr. Sutcliffe [holding answer 15 June 2006]: The detailed information requested may be obtained only at a disproportionate cost. However, I can advise that, as at 18 July, only two of the non-foreign national prisoners who absconded from Ford open prison in 2006 remain unlawfully at large.
Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department pursuant to the answer of 3 May 2006, Official Report, column 1623W, to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) on prisons, when the report on reconviction analysis being conducted by the Research, Development and Statistics Unit will be published. [84673]
Mr. Sutcliffe: The report will be published on the RDS website (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/onlinepubs1.html) by the end of 2006.
David T.C. Davies: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what the budget is per person per day for meals for prison inmates. [85100]
Mr. Sutcliffe:
There is no set budget for prisoner meals. Governors have the freedom to decide what proportion of the budget allocated to them should be
spent on food for prisoners. For 2004-05, the latest period for which data is available, the average public sector Prison Service daily food cost was £1.87.
Private Security Industry Act
Mr. Harper: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what estimate his Department made of the number of people that might request each type of licence under the Private Security Industry Act 2001 prior to the start of applications. [76850]
Mr. Coaker: As stated in the Government’s White Paper (Proposals for Regulation of the Private Security Industry in England and Wales, CM 4254) in March 1999, accurate statistics on the size of the private security industry have always been difficult to obtain. The most recent estimate contained in the White Paper was that in 1994 there were 162,000 licensable people, based on research by the Policy Studies Institute.
In their 2004-05 business plan the Security Industry Authority (SIA) estimated that the total licensable population was just over 221,000. The SIA has continued to update its estimates in the light of operational experience and the current estimate is that about 183,000 individuals require a licence. The majority of this change is due to the revision of the estimated size of the door supervisor sector. A breakdown of these figures by each type of licence is in the following table.
| Sector | 2004-05 business plan estimates | Latest estimate |
Probation Service
Mark Williams: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department when he expects to be in a position to introduce legislation to reform the probation service. [86353]
Mr. Sutcliffe: We set out our plans for the probation service in “Working with probation to protect the public and reduce re-offending” which was published on 30 March. We will introduce the necessary legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows.
Public Enquiry Office
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what recent instructions he has issued for CCTV coverage of the Public Enquiry Office counter to be improved. [73706]
John Reid: The recommendation has been accepted and consideration of implementation is ongoing.
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what steps he has taken since the publication of the report on investigations into allegations about the Public Enquiry Office in Croydon to find out the views of asylum applicants on the allegations made by Mr. Pamnani. [73696]
John Reid: The recommendation has been accepted and consideration of implementation is ongoing.
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what guidance he issued to Mr. Tim Gbedemah concerning the persons from whom he should take evidence during the investigation into allegations about the Public Enquiry Office in Croydon. [73698]
John Reid: I am advised that Mr. Gbedemah's terms of reference are set out at paragraph two of his report. No specific guidance was given to Mr. Gbedemah as to whom he should and should not interview.
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what plans he has to introduce a new code of conduct for PEO staff; when he will publish it; what (a) training and (b) guidance has been given to PEO staff on the new code; to what extent the Immigration and Nationality Directorate’s Security and Anti-Corruption Unit is delivering the training; and what guidance the code will contain on non-work related contact with applicants. [73711]
John Reid: The recent investigation into events at the PEO, carried out by David Stephens and Tim Gbedemah, made a number of recommendations, including that consideration be given to putting in place a code of conduct for PEO staff.
This recommendation was accepted, and is currently being acted upon. We hope to have a draft code of conduct available for consultation with staff in July. The document will contain guidance on non-work related contact with applicants. The detail is currently being developed.
IND’s Security and Anti-Corruption Unit and PEO managers will jointly deliver the training to new and existing staff.
Road Accidents (Mobile Telephones)
Grant Shapps: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many (a) deaths, (b) serious incidents and (c) other accidents have been caused by persons driving while using hand-held mobile telephones since 1 December 2003, broken down by police force area. [83519]
Dr. Ladyman: I have been asked to reply.
The information available relates to factors that are judged by the police as having contributed to a road accident in which someone was injured. The table shows the number of personal injury road accidents reported to the police in 2005 that have “Driver using mobile phone” assigned as a contributory factor, broken down by severity, as well as the resulting fatalities. This information is not available for earlier years.
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