Prisons face ‘breaking point’ within days of UK election, says governors’ union

Jails in England and Wales will be at “operational breaking point” within days of the general election, requiring a likely Labour government to take tough decisions immediately, the head of the prison governors’ union has warned.

Tom Wheatley, president of the Prison Governors’ Association, told the Financial Times that if the main opposition party were to win power, as polls suggest, it would inherit a service that was arguably no longer “still a going concern”.

He said the current Conservative government had ignored repeated warnings about overcrowding and that official data showed jails would reach “operational breaking point”, where they could no longer safely accept more inmates, within a “week or two” of the election.

“The government has known about this for ages. There are things they could have done, and didn’t, right up until the election was called,” Wheatley said in an interview. “They made it inevitable that someone else would have to make very difficult decisions.”

Wheatley said the criminal justice system would “grind to a halt” without urgent action. He painted a scenario in which prisons would have to reject new inmates, police cells would fill up and courts would have to delay sentencing, with police officers forced to slow the rate of arrests before long.

According to the most recent figures published by the Ministry of Justice on June 28, the prison population stood at 87,360. Capacity, already stretched by the practice of assigning two prisoners to the same cell, is 88,818 in England and Wales.  

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When prisons were similarly close to bursting point last October, the MoJ began authorising some inmates to be released 70 days early. While that measure was still in operation, it had already “produced its bounty”, Wheatley said.

The MoJ had not been fully transparent about how many people had been released under the scheme, but he estimated that 30 per cent to 50 per cent of those set free had been returned to jail either because they had reoffended or had broken the terms of their release.

The criminal justice system has been under intense strain for more than a decade, with police, prison and justice budgets among the hardest hit by former Conservative chancellor George Osborne’s austerity programme.

Over the same period, since 2010, the average prison sentence has increased by 57 per cent as a result of changes made to ensure more serious offenders spent longer behind bars. Overcrowding has been compounded by record backlogs of court cases and the number of people being held on remand.

Wheatley, who has been a governor of six prisons himself, said the next government would have to immediately introduce short-term safeguards, including the interim use of police cells.

It might have to consider using electronic tags to monitor sentenced offenders at home until prison space is freed up, he suggested.

Prison governors are also lobbying for offenders serving standard determinate sentences to be released earlier, after serving 40 per cent to 45 per cent of a term instead of half under current law. This would relieve pressure on the service while new capacity is built, they argue.

Wheatley said governors would support alternatives to short prison sentences for minor offences, and that any attempt by the next government to force more people into the prison estate would lead the PGA and the Prison Officers’ Association to “seek legal advice”.

Labour has mirrored the Conservatives’ pledge to build 20,000 new prison places but has not said what it will do in the short term to address overcrowding.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said on Wednesday that if he won power, he would inherit a “massive mess” in prisons that would require “hard yards” to sort out.

“I‘m not going to . . . get ahead of myself on what we’ll need to do but it’s a very serious problem when the government has allowed the prison system to get so full . . . that we are having to release people who should be in prison,” he told reporters on a campaign visit in Wales.

The Conservative party and the MoJ did not respond to a request for comment.