“We are disappointed by today’s announcements.

“As the leading private provider of prison management in the UK, we have 20 years of experience of running prisons for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Our performance across all six prisons we run has been to a high standard with every aspect of performance either meeting or exceeding the Key Performance Indicators applied by the MoJ.

“We look forward to discussing the contract award decision with the MoJ within the next few days to determine why we were unsuccessful.”

• On 21 November the Ministry of Justice confirmed the following:

"The Ministry of Justice can confirm that for HMP Wolds, G4S's score met the non-price threshold and, had the competition for HMP Wolds continued, G4S would have been invited to participate at the second stage of the process. However, the competition was ended for the reasons set out in the written ministerial statement of 8 November 2012, being that the benefits of the competition, when compared to the option of clustering the Wolds with the nearby prison HMP Everthorpe, did not represent best value to the public.

The Secretary of State specifically referred to G4S in his speech on 21 November at the Centre for Social Justice when he said that 'we didn't take back the Wolds prison from G4S because of what happened at the Olympics. We did so because having looked at their bid, it made more sense to merge with with a group of neighbouring public prisons, with shared facilities, shared leadership and so reduce costs quickly' ".