Decision report 201204986

Summary

Mr C, who is a prisoner, complained that prisoners only had access to water which was not as good quality as the water available to staff in his prison. Our investigation established that this was not the case. Staff and prisoners had access to water coolers of different types. For reasons of flexibility, staff tended to have the type with bottled water and prisoners tended to have the type that require proximity to a water tap (at which point the water went through a filtration process). In any case, we found that prisons were not required to provide anything other than normal tap water for prisoners.

Mr C considered that the prison's reply to his complaint about the above was wrong because he thought it conflicted with another reply he had received. However, we were satisfied that this was not the case.