More than 20 mobiles phones are confiscated from prisoners every day in jails in England and Wales, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Prison officers seized a total of 17,672 handsets that had been smuggled into jails between January 2016 and March this year, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

The devices are banned in prisons, in part because inmates had been found using them to arrange revenge attacks or contact petrified victims.

Access to mobile phones has been associated with the spread of synthetic drugs because prisoners are able to contact organised criminal gangs to arrange to get substances like Spice inside. The National Crime Agency estimates that one in 13 inmates has organised crime links.

Some prisoners have even posted videos and photographs of themselves on social media accounts taking drugs while on prison landings.

HMP Altcourse, a privately run jail in Liverpool saw the most telephones - 1,139 - seized during 27 month period. Forest Bank Prison in Salford had 1,100 phones confiscated.

The Prison Service has invested £7 million to provide in-cell telephones and digital kiosks for inmates in an attempt to reduce the demand for illicit mobiles.

A spokesman for the Prison Service insisted that the discovery of more than 17,000 phones was proof that they were stamping out the use of the handsets.