Supporting Prison Officers
1/24. What steps her Department is taking to support prison officers.
By immediately reducing prison overcrowding, we have made prisons safer to work in. We have also accepted the 5% pay award recommended for prison officers in full.
I have been made aware of the consequences of 14 years of neglect of our Prison and Probation Service by the Conservative party: the critical overcrowding due to the lack of investment; staff at all levels feeling exhausted, scared, demotivated, disenfranchised and undervalued; officers facing unacceptably high levels of violence and drug abuse; and bullying between prisoners. What is the Department doing to rectify the consequences of this litany of neglect by the so-called party of law and order, to give our prison officers the support they deserve?
My hon. Friend tells it how it is. The Conservative party left our Prison and Probation Service in a mess. Our job, on behalf of the British people, is to clean up that mess. That is what we are doing.
HMP Featherstone, HMP Oakwood and HMP Brinsford, also a young offender institution, in my constituency are brilliantly supported by amazing staff, but one of the pressures on them is the number of foreign national offenders in those prisons. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that those foreign national offenders are returned to where they came from?
We are already on track to remove more foreign national offenders than the Conservative party ever did.