Luciana Berger – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2015-11-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many drones carrying contraband goods have been seized within prison grounds in each of the last three years.

Andrew Selous

There were no reported incidents of drones carrying contraband being seized within prisons in 2013; in 2014 there were two reported incidents; and between 1 January 2015 and 31 October 2015 there were eight reported incidents.

This Government has made it a criminal offence under the Prison Act 1952 to throw, or otherwise project, any article of substance into prison without authorisation. This includes the use of a drone.

These figures have been drawn from live administrative data systems. Care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, but the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system.