Christina Rees – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Christina Rees on 2015-12-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, which prisons have libraries; and which organisations (a) run and (b) fund each such library.

Andrew Selous

All prisons in England and Wales have a library. NOMS has been responsible for funding prison library services in England from April 2011.

The total NOMS allocated budget for prison libraries in 2015/16 in England was £7,592,414

The attached table shows both the provider and allocated library budget for each prison in England since 2010. NOMS is not responsible for funding library services in prisons in Wales as this is a devolved function of the Welsh Government so data is not included. Privately managed prison contracts put in place since 2011 have identified levels of funding for libraries and so are included in the table. The table does not include library provision at privately managed prisons whose contracts were awarded before 2011 as this was part of the overall included contract price and so it is not possible to extract a specific cost element to this part of the contract. This equates to 10 prisons.

On 8 September 2015 the Secretary of State announced a review of the quality of education in prisons, chaired by Dame Sally Coates, which will report later in the year.