Dear HM Prison Service,

1. Please provide an up to date list of all prisons to which prisoners over 18 convicted of criminal offences are sent to in England and Wales by their prison security category (A, B, C or D), also indicating whether they are for male or for female prisoners, the total number of prisoners held in each of those prisons and whether each of those prisons are wholly or partially dedicated to housing Vulnerable Prisoners (VP Prisoners) or not. This information should be provided for all prisons in England and Wales whether operated by HMPS itself or by a privatised prison contractor such as SERCO. Much of this information used to be listed on the HMPS website but has now inexplicably been removed from each prison's website page during the COVID-19 Pandemic period.

This information is needed for any UK prisoner in a prison detention facility who wishes to make a prison transfer to another prison in the same prison category they are currently categorised to serve their sentence in yet it is not provided by HMPS at all or in any reliable or consistent fashion on its website for reasons that are unclear. I have also tried to obtain that information from your telephone contact centre in Newport, Wales and as with almost any question raised with them they did not hold any information of any kind about prison category types or whether or not each prison within those types houses Vulnerable (VP) Prisoners or not.

2. In addition to the above while compiling this list can you please also indicate for each prison or detention facility in England and Wales whether that facility offers phone in cell for outgoing calls only to either all prisoners in the prison or if offered only partially in some cells then please indicate the total number of cells in prison in which phone in cell is available and the total number of cells in which it is not available in the prison.

The prison service's current policy of being almost completely secretive and untransparent about which prisons it has and has not installed phone in cell in is currently causing great feelings of unfairness and unjustness to prisoners in prisons where phone in cell was available (eg Isle of Wight) who are then transferred to a prison without phone in cell (The Verne) of a supposedly lower and more liberal security type and where no explanation is offered by the staff at the prison for HMPS's completely inconsistent and secretive policy of installing phone in cells in some prisons and not in others.

3. Across all prisons in England and Wales, including prisons operated by commercial private operators can you please indicate the current basis of distribution and allocation of the 900 locked mobile handsets that were reported to have been distributed to 55 prisons in a press release that the prison service itself put out at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March or April 2020 (and as still reported at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho...) and indicate what are the criteria for a prisoner in any of those 55 prisons kept in their cell with no other contact for 23 hours a day to obtain access to or use of any of those locked mobile handsets allocated to their prison and if there is any logical system at all of prioritisation of prisoners having access to these handsets in these 55 prisons (presumably they are all prisons that still do not have phone in cell) that takes in to account the extent of disruption of their normal pattern of maintaining contact with family and friends in the outside world. Although the writer notes that HMPS made a great deal of PR out of the allocation of these phones to UK prisons it appears that many of them have never reached real prisoners and instead been stockpiled by the prison for their own unknown purposes.

4. Can HMPS release copies of any internal papers or discussion documents of any kind that exist that explain its program in conjunction with BT Group for rolling out phone in cell in all of the prisons which it operates and/or that are operated by privatised prison operators, explaininging the basis on which installation of phone in cell has been prioritised to those prisons that have it, the cost to the prison service of installing phone in cell in each prison that already has it or may eventually have it deployed, and how much longer those prisons which don't have it can be expected to wait for the installation of such facilities before the program to install phone in cell in conjunction with BT Group is completed. Please can you also provide any documents that show how it is considered just and equitable for prisoners in some prisons where they are locked in cell for 23 and a half hours day to have access to phone in cell while prisoners in other prisons do not have such a facility so the extent of their sense of isolation and depression as a result of having no other human contact for 23 and a half hours each day is likely to be much greater. Please also provide any documents that indicate whether the decision on whether to have phone in cell or not at each prison is decided centrally by the prison service or is a matter for each individual prison Governor in terms of the way they utilise their budget for the provision of new facilities in their prison.

5. Can you please provide a comprehensive list for every prison individually in England and Wales operated by HMPS or by a privatised contractor (presuming that HMPS still has the power to obtain such data for prisons it has outsourced the operation of) of the phone charges paid by prisoners to use either a prison PIN phone in cell or a prison PIN phone on a wing (if and where the charges are different for phones in cell vs shared phones on the wings) for calling (a) a standard national rate UK number beginning 01, 02 and 03 and (b) a standard mobile phone number in the range 075 to 079 and for both groups of calls any difference in charges between peak and off peak times of day for making calls, including any different charges or peak and off peak hours that may apply on weekdays vs the weekend. In the writer's opinion all of this information should already be freely available to either the world at large or at least to prisoners families and friends by publication on a dedicated website area but instead the information is not published at all and is deliberately secretively withheld by HMPS and BT Group, neither of whom publish prison PIN phone rates applicable at each prison in any of their normal publicly available tariff lists.

The writer would like to make it clear that the gross inequity in some prisoners having access to phone in cell and others not having it and even more harshly and inexplicably prisoners losing access to phone in cell when they are recategorised to a lower security prison type has a very damaging effect on the psychological welfare of prisoners who lose access to this facility without any explanation or justification by the prison service's senior management or the management team within each UK prison and especially in the context of a 23 and a half hour a day lockdown in cell that has been going on for more than a year. And in this case it is likely to cause a prisoner to need to make a request to transfer prisons because of the adverse consequence on their mental welfare of only being able to make at best one 10 minute call a day in the only 30 minutes they have had out of their cells on the majority of days since the commencement of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the UK in late March 2019

I look forward to hearing from you.