Decision Report 201501192

Summary

Mr C told us he applied for transfer to a prison elsewhere in the UK for family reasons. He said there was a delay in the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) dealing with his transfer application, and that the SPS lost his application.

The SPS investigated what happened to Mr C’s application. Although they were unable to identify exactly when and how it went missing, they accepted that they misplaced the application and that there was an unreasonable delay in identifying that it was missing. The SPS did not provide us with their policy, procedure or guidance relating to the administration of cross-border transfer applications. It was not clear to us what the SPS learned from their investigation into this incident to ensure it would not happen again. We concluded that there was no reliable system in place to log the receipt of transfer applications and to track their progress, both at the prison and possibly at SPS headquarters. We upheld Mr C’s complaints and made a recommendation to address our concerns.

Recommendations

We recommended that the SPS:

• provide us with reassurance that there is a reliable system in place for logging and tracking cross-border transfer applications.