Ms Caron McCaffrey:

Part of the day-to-day activity within a prison is to bring people for future court dates, if they have them. Approximately 20% of our population is made up of remand prisoners who obviously have quite a lot of court activity. There are also the sentenced prisoners who have future court dates and would need to attend court. There are resources within our system, known as the Prison Service escort corps which is funded to do about 12,000 escorts per year. Prior to Covid, we were doing about 30,000 physical escorts to court. Obviously, the resources to do this must come from within our body of staff. Regrettably, that comes from prison offices assigned to other tasks within the prison being diverted to carry out court escort duties.