Tuck in! Food budget up 25%
The budget for prisoners’ daily meals has been raised by 25 per cent this year, after complaints that prison kitchens were struggling to afford food.
For the current financial year, 2023/24, prisons have been allocated £2.70 per prisoner per day to spend on meals. Whilst it may not sound a lot, it is a substantial increase on the previous year’s figure of only £2.16 per prisoner per day.
The cost-of-living crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent inflation to a 40-year high, and food prices have been among the worst affected. Prices of food in the UK in March were 19 per cent higher than a year earlier. Nevertheless, the 25 per cent rise in the prison food budget represents a real-terms increase which should make life easier for catering managers.
The figures, provided to Inside Time by the Ministry of Justice in response to a Freedom of Information request, represent the benchmark figure which, according to Prison Service headquarters, it should cost to feed an adult prisoner three meals a day – a breakfast pack, a cold meal and a hot meal. Menus must offer vegetarian and halal options, and must meet nutrition requirements set by the Food Standards Agency, which says men need 2,500 calories a day and women 2,000.
Governors are allocated funding per prisoner to provide essentials, including an element for food which is based on the benchmark. They can vary the amount they spend – but if a prison were to spend more than £2.70 per prisoner per day on food, it would need to find savings in other areas such as prisoners’ clothing, cleaning products or prisoner wages.
Separate figures are published at the end of each financial year for how much prisons actually spent on food. In 2022/23 the actual spend was £2.68 per prisoner per day – which was significantly higher than the £2.16 budgeted spend. Earlier this year, Inside Time reported that prison kitchens were resorting to cost-saving measures including replacing deep-fried chips with oven chips and stopping providing pepper with meals.
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