WPIC response to Rudd Review

Amber Rudd. Image courtesy of UK Government

On 1 July 2026, Shortly before he was replaced as Lord Chancellor, David Lammy announced that former Home Secretary Amber Rudd would lead a review “to make prisons safer, tackle crime and deliver long-term reform that protects the public”. The review is due to report by December 2026.

WPIC has made a submission to the review. Our full response is attached at the end of this post. Because the review required an online response to a number of overlapping questions, there is inevitably some repetition. We have therefore also prepared a summary of the main points in our submission, which is below.

Summary of WPIC response to the Rudd Review

1. Fundamental Reform of HMPPS is necessary

HMPPS is overly centralised, poorly managed, and not fit for purpose. It requires major structural reform, including greater devolution to prison Governors. Evidence includes:

·       weak leadership - reactive decision-making, too much bureaucracy and failure to encourage a debate about the purpose of prison; misleading statements about decommissioning cells without Automatic Fire Detection

·       poor procurement – the new healthcare centre at Wandsworth was substantially completed in 2021 but was unused for three and a half years, with no adequate explanation

·       secrecy and inadequate accountability – HMPPS has repeatedly refused to answer WPIC’s questions about contracting at Wandsworth

·       slow decision-making – Two years after £100m was committed to Wandsworth, only £5m appears to have been spent

2. Reducing the Use of Imprisonment

We send too many people to prison. We should only imprison people where that is the best outcome for the individual and society. Politicians should not give in to victim lobbying and should encourage a public debate about the purpose of prison and make the case for sending fewer people to prison. Alternatives include:

·       shorter sentences,

·       greater use of community sentencing, including by using technology and improving support from probation officers

·       quicker transfers to mental hospitals

·       reduced use of remand

·       fewer recalls

3. Rehabilitation Over Punishment

Prisons should focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending as well as public protection and represent value for money for taxpayers.

·       There should be more purposeful activity and training, delivered on wings if moving prisoners around the prison is difficult;

·       Better preparation for release including working with local mayors on accommodation and employment. No one should be released from prison homeless

4. Greater Autonomy for Governors

Devolve power from HMPPS headquarters to prison governors. Governors should have much greater control over recruitment, much larger discretionary budgets, power to get maintenance done quickly, develop local initiatives and to work more closely with local organisations. 

5. Workforce Quality, Training and Professionalisation

Prison officers need better recruitment, training, appraisal, qualifications, support, and status. Staff quality is fundamental to prison performance.

·       Officer to prisoner ratios should be restored to pre-Grayling levels

·       Allow governors and senior staff to meet new officers and have a right of refusal before appointment

·       Qualifications required should be more than no visible tattoos, eg literacy and good social skills

·       Require annual appraisals

·       Better training – the Vanguard wing at Wandsworth demonstrates the impact of better selection and training

·       Reinstate the Unlocked Graduates scheme

6. Humanity, Safety and Decency in Prison Conditions

Prisoners should be treated with dignity and respect. Evidence of failures include:

·       Excessive time locked in cells – HMPPS does not appear to have reliable figures for time out of cell. The HMPPS policy of not more than 22 hours locked in cells is inhumane and applies to far too many prisoners

·       Poor living conditions resulting from the ageing estate, including vermin, overheating and poor ventilation. A German court has refused to extradite to the UK.

·       Overcrowding, with many prisoners sharing cells built for one person

·       Inadequate hygiene – cells should not have a toilet next to the bed; prisoners should have access to showers, hot water and a change of clothes

·       Loss of property, including precious possessions such as photos of family and court papers, causes distress. There needs to be a better system to track property including clothing sent to the prison laundry

·       Insufficient healthcare – WPIC’s experience from attending inquests has exposed inadequate first night health assessments, poor access to medical records and failures to dispense required medications; provide regular health checks to prevent deterioration in fitness

·       Poor quality food - enable prisoners to cook and eat communally

7. Family Contact and Community Involvement

Maintaining family relationships can help reduce reoffending and there is more that prisons can do to support families and treat them with respect. For example:

·       Simplify the rules for visits and improve visitor facilities, especially for families with children. Use the goodwill of external organisations who are willing to help

·       Better communication with families about the needs of prisoners

·       Simplify the rules to make it easier for families to send in clothing for their loved ones eg don’t require an application from a prisoner. WPIC knows of many cases where clothing has not got through.

·       Make it easier for prisoners to phone families – Further reduce the call rates; enable diversion services; enable incoming calls to cells; reduce delays in receiving PINs; make a note of numbers before prisoners hand in their mobile phones; ensure prisoners on ACCTs can always make phone calls

HMPPS should work more with the third sector and stop penny pinching over their contracts. The contract with Unlocked Graduates should be renewed. Prisons should harness the goodwill and generosity of the general public and volunteers. Companies who work in prisons or employ ex-prisoners should receive tax breaks.

8. Accountability, Oversight and Regulatory Powers

The four primary watchdogs – Coroners, the Prisons’ Ombudsman, Independent Monitoring Boards and HM Inspector of Prisons – have very limited powers to enforce recommendations. We need to see stronger regulation, greater transparency, the duty of candour requirement and improved scrutiny. WPIC supports the Prisons’ Ombudsman’s arguments for an independent body to review complaints against prison officers.

9. Modernisation Through Technology

Technology is a major opportunity across prisons and probation. Suggestions include paperless ACCTs using digital transcription, better interface of health records on NOMIS and SystemOne, use AI to support release processes, tracking of property, electronic monitoring of people with community sentences and on licence, and improved prisoner access to technology and education. 

10. Estate, Infrastructure and Investment Failures

Although it is starting to improve, Wandsworth Prison, like many other Victorian prisons, is in a poor condition. The infrastructure is deteriorating and it appears to be very difficult to get simple repairs done. Boilers fail resulting in either no hot water or overheating. HMPPS’s management of capital projects is shocking with substantial delays and poor value for money. HMPPS announced £13m in August 2024 for shower refurbishment and associated rebuilding, for up to 50 showers – an average cost of £250k for each shower

·      Reintroduce inhouse maintenance teams to carry out repairs promptly and make more use of prisoners to carry out regular maintenance

·      Greater transparency in contracting for major works

·      Special prisons for the elderly and disabled, possibly involving local mayors

·      No prisoners should have to share cells built for one person

Full WPIC response to the Rudd Review

Theme 1 – key outcomes risks and opportunities

Question 1

Key outcomes are protecting the public, reducing reoffending and rehabilitation and value for money for taxpayers

Additional outcome – only imprisoning people where that is the best outcome for the individual and society

These outcomes are the most important for obvious reasons. At root HMPPS needs a complete overhaul, including significant devolution from its centre to Governors running prisons. A Lords’ committee said HMPPS is barely fit for purpose. It shows terrible people management, procurement incompetence, arrogant secrecy and glacial response times. Its prisons are gripped by a drugs crisis and produce the highest reoffending rate in Europe. Any review that propounds a low cost prisons building programme as a solution is simply continuing past failure. It is generally agreed violent crime has decreased over the last 16 years. If government policy is to be evidence led, where is the evidence that supports a prison building policy to increase capacity? Our prisons are full for a variety of avoidable reasons (In Justice Blog, Kelly Grehan, 16 August 2026): between 2010 and September 2025 the average custodial sentence length jumped from 13.7 months to 19.9 months; there was a collapse in the use of community sentences, from 2013 to 2023 community sentences fell by 51%; conditional discharges plummeted from 38,246 in 2019 to 11,861 in 2023; an astounding 51,419 people were recalled to prison in the year to March 2026, in the 1990s the figure was closer to 150 a year. Only 22% of recalls involve further offending. The rest are a result of a failure to equip people for release. We should use prisons last, after all else has failed. That means reductions in custodial sentencing, shorter sentences, more community sentences, quicker transfers to mental hospitals, a resentencing of IPP prisoners, a review of joint enterprise sentences and fewer recalls and serious reform of the remand system. Politicians need the guts to stand up to the public and the loud victim lobby. MPs take a principled stand against public opinion on capital punishment by the state: why not on having decent rehabilitative prisons where people won’t want to kill themselves and won’t reoffend when they are released? We need much greater skills for an increased number of prison staff, and a large increase in autonomy for governors over recruitment, the regime and the day-to-day repair of their estate. The local community needs involvement, local mayors should have a leading role in the provision of social care for mentally ill prisoners, the elderly, infirm and disabled. This will also help to achieve greater transparency. Prisons need to deliver more out of cell activities, including on the wings if it is difficult to move prisoners to activities in other parts of a prison. HMPPS should support local initiatives and not cancel them when they work, it should bring back Unlocked Graduates and embrace working with local volunteers and third sector organisations. Much more help is needed for families supporting their loved ones in prisons, which has been proven to reduce reoffending. Prison reform groups have existed for more than 200 years but conditions remain very poor. The supervision arrangements for prisons are extremely weak. The four primary ‘watchdogs’: Coroners, the Prisons’ Ombudsman, HM Inspector of Prisons, and the Independent Monitoring Boards all have very limited powers, if any, to enforce recommendations. The Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate has some powers but needs more.

Question 2 – biggest risks which need to be addressed

Risks to the ability of prisons to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce reoffending; risks to the safety and wellbeing of staff and prisoners; adequacy of existing prison technology and infrastructure

Additional risks – regulators have no teeth; conditions deteriorate to the point where we breach Mandela rules or EU standards (resulting in refusal of other countries to extradite prisoners to the UK); HMPPS is not fit for purpose and needs a major overhaul

The very limited regime and time out of cell and poor attendance at activities currently mean very little is done to rehabilitate prisoners and the reoffending rate is very high, coupled with the enormous drugs problem at present. This leads to boredom, frustration, violence and a lack of safety both for staff and prisoners. The ageing estate and the poor use of technology by prisons combine to create further risk particularly as regards the care of the mentally ill and the supervision of health arrangements.

Prisons will never improve until they have a regulatory environment that actually has powers to ensure that the MOJ and in turn HM Treasury provide the necessary funding to address systemic problems found by inspectors, coroners, ombudsman et al. If this is allowed to continue the UK prison system breaches international rules. There’s already been a case of a German court refusing to extradite to the UK. At the root is the lack of leadership within HMPPS and politicians’ resistance to the need for profound change in fear of what the popular media will say.

In addition, we echo the call from Adrian Usher, the Prison and Probation Ombudsman, for the creation of an independent body to oversee investigations of individual staff conduct. It is unacceptable with the imminent arrival of the Hillsborough Law that, unlike the police, HMPPS alone act as judge and jury of staff conduct and the outcome of disciplinary proceedings. This will shed light on what actually happens in prisons, where failures by prison staff often have tragic consequences, as we see at inquests we attend into deaths in Wandsworth. And it will go a long way to restoring the trust of families of prisoners in the prison service that the prison service believes in its duty of care to the men and women in its charge.

In March 2026 Inside Time reported the Lord Chancellor’s plans to merge the Independent Monitoring Boards and HM Inspector of Prisons. Five months on there are still no details on these proposals. It’s essential the function of prison visiting by IMBs is maintained, and as part of the new remit IMB members must also visit prisons at night when staffing shortages create chaos and most deaths happen, as we know from inquests. The IMBs are also failing to get their message to the public other than through annual reports. The Wandsworth IMB believes itself bound by its independence not to attend or address the meetings of the Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign. This is a missed opportunity to engage with the public on conditions in prison.

Question 3 – biggest opportunities to address the risks

Opportunity one

Restore officer to prisoner ratio to pre-Grayling cuts levels but improve quality as well as quantity of prison staff. Low cost options include allowing governors and senior prison staff to meet potential recruits and have a right of refusal and requiring annual staff appraisals.  If the total prison population is substantially reduced over time then the ratio of officers to prisoners can be increased without the total number of officers being increased.

Opportunity two

Grant greater autonomy to prison governors, giving much greater control over recruitment and expenditure, handing over much more of the budget to them, supported by transfer of admin staff from HMPPS HQ. Use the lessons from Manchester under Burnham to change the balance of power to the local prison. Trust Governors and support them.

Opportunity three

Very substantially reduce the proportion of offenders (and especially those on remand) sent to prison - which would greatly aid the efficacy of opportunities 1 and 2.

Why do you think these are the biggest opportunities?

These are the biggest opportunities because a well-trained adequate workforce is key to the successful running of a rehabilitative regime that gets people out of their cells and onto activities that will prepare them for life outside. It should also greatly reduce the appeal of drugs. The overly centralised model run by HMPPS clearly does not work and it must instead give much more power to governors and properly support them. All of this needs to be underpinned by a radical revision of the approach to custodial sentencing to reduce the prison population. Technology provides opportunities for community sentencing which reduces reoffending.  Investment in recruiting and training staff (in prisons and probation) and reducing the number of prisoners held in custody, will be more cost effective than building new prison places.

Theme 2 – the prison estate and its capacity

Question 4 – risks to prison capacity

(1) A lack of political willingness to make the point publicly that we send far too many offenders to prison. Vindictive public opinion is pandered to by politicians who are swayed by victim lobbying. There is a trend for ever lengthier sentences and the excessive (ab)use of Joint Enterprise law. (2) A lack of political willingness to argue that we should spend more money now to improve prisons, saving money and improving society in the long-run, not least the £56,000 pa it costs to imprison each prisoner. (3) A failure to ensure that offenders leave prison less likely to offend again, rather than more likely. Other risks to prison capacity are failure to improve probation and deal with recall and remand policies; crumbling infrastructure; poor staffing levels of inadequately trained and managed staff; lack of activities; lack of accommodation and planning for men released on license (of whom far too many are still released from prison homeless). Prisons increasingly pick up the can for social breakdown, the mental health crisis, and public order breakdowns, failures in education and a broken care system where half of care leavers offend by the time they're 24.

Question 5 – opportunities to address risks to prison capacity

The opportunities to reduce capacity risk include: An honest public debate about the purpose of prison. Only imprisoning people where it is necessary and/or likely to result in a better long-term outcome for the individual imprisoned and society as a whole. As propounded by Martin Narey, former Director General of the Prison Service, we should aim to imprison only “the people who we’re scared of, not the people we’re bloody angry with”. Enhanced and efficient use of tagging.  Reduction in remands in custody; better use of IT to speed up trials and reduce court backlogs. As the prison population is reduced, prisons which are not fit for purpose can be taken out of use (with land sold off to further fund the system).

We should professionalise new prison building and maintenance of the existing estate.  We need transparency in contracting for major prison works, and the reintroduction of inhouse maintenance teams within prisons under the control of the Governor to keep day to day repairs done promptly.

But we have no confidence HMPPS can achieve this. Wandsworth is a public procurement scandal. A new Healthcare Centre at Wandsworth was fundamentally completed in 2021. It was not used by a single prisoner until March 2025. Various different, conflicting and frankly trivial “explanations” did not explain a three-and-a-half-year delay.

In the August 2024 action plan for Wandsworth set out by HMPPS after the very adverse HMIP inspection report £22 million was to be spent on window replacements. HMPPS said “There are approximately 1520 individual window units to be replaced as part of the project.”  An average cost of £14,473 per window. We’ve asked, "Are you satisfied such cost will represent good value for the public money spent?" No further information or explanation has been offered. No physical progress appears yet to have been made on this project. The 2024 Action Plan claimed the project "has been approved and the prison is awaiting the final tender of works”.  But the NAO said in June 2026, “HMPPS expects the final business case for the window replacement project to be approved in the next few months.” No progress has been made in nearly two years. 

HMPPS also announced £13 million for shower refurbishment work in August 2024, and told us 50 showers were in the project. An average cost per shower of a quarter of a million pounds.  The NAO tells us “the shower project is more substantial than a like for like replacement. It involves internal rebuilding work to increase the number of showers from 26 to 51. It will also improve ventilation (which is important for showers in such heavy use) and improve the quality of the facilities.”  But this is still a project to provide showers and ancillary works at an average cost per shower of £250,000. The blank refusal to disclose any breakdown of costs confirms our belief these costs cannot be justified.

Question 6 – biggest changes needed to the prison estate

The following changes to the design, configuration and condition of the prison estate are urgently needed:

• Better visiting facilities for families with cafes, clean toilets, and a place to park, wait, and rest before and after visits. There should be better communication with and input from  families about the needs of prisoners and the possible lines of rehabilitation and better infrastructure for families to stay in touch, including lower cost phone calls and making it easier for families to hand in clothing.

• Special prisons for the elderly and disabled, and more release on license for those whose age and infirmity make it unlikely they will offend again. HMPPS must work with the NHS to get the mentally ill to hospital and out of prison. Local Mayors and Governors should be allowed to set up and run small scale prisons for the increasing number of prisoners over 70 who still need to be locked up but who are no longer a flight risk.

• Better prison configurations and traffic patterns for roll call, exercise, time out of cell, association and activities. Configurations must cope with increasing gang membership; and the threats to vulnerable prisoners.

• No prisoner should be housed in a cell with another prisoner, when that cell was designed for one inhabitant. Cells must be designed such that each can be isolated individually if water or power damaged, and a substantial number of cells need to be changed so that they can be monitored by CCTV if occupied by anyone suicidal or violent

• Adapt prisons for climate change eg Wandsworth has roof vents but they cannot be used without cutting off the heating and hot water systems and therefore they are not used when they should be.

• Urgent completion of fire safety improvements

Theme 4 – Prison leadership and workforce

Question 9 – risks relating to the prison workforce

The current risks are mismanagement, poor HR practices, poor recruitment, inadequate mentoring and training, poor culture. Many experienced staff left during the last round of redundancies and cuts. An organisation that relies on a workface whose only qualification is no visible tattoos is destined to fail. The workforce needs more training, assessment as they progress, more pride in high standards of care, and a qualification that would enable them to feel valued in society. Prison officers need to be higher quality, better educated, IT literate, with good social skills. The profile of the career needs to be raised. There is a general lack of public respect and prison officers feel this and behave accordingly.

Officers should have the right to strike; earlier retirement is needed as the job is physically demanding and with high levels of mental stress.

The MOJ should hang its head with shame for terminating the Unlocked Graduates scheme.

HMPPS must stop issuing endless instructions and empower Governors to make the right decisions for their prisons. Prospective officers must only be appointed after having visited the prison and spoken to the governor.  It is madness that new officers are regularly allocated to a prison without even having visited that prison or, indeed, any prison at all.

Whistle blowers in Wandsworth have not been well treated, leading to ostracism. HMPPS has a culture of secrecy and will urgently need to respond to duty of candour changes. HMPPS routinely effectively dismiss Select Committee findings. This has also infected this current review: it’s astonishing that the Scope and Purpose preamble to your call for evidence makes no reference to critical, thoughtful and detailed reports about prisons from either the House of Commons Justice Select Committee or the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee.

Senior HMPPS executives are cavalier, almost contemptuous when they appear before parliament. The decision by HMPPS to walk away from their previous publicly made commitments to parliament to install Automatic Fire Detection (AFD) in cells by 2027 was completely unacceptable. Given the scale of the problem, it is inconceivable that senior civil servants made these statements to parliament in an honest belief that cells without AFD would be taken out of use, given the capacity crisis across the prison estate.

Question 10 – opportunities to address these risks and improve outcomes for staff and the wider prison system

All staff to have a proper appraisal process and much deeper training such that they feel valued, supported, guided and that the job they are doing is a skilled profession. New training plans have been announced but we still have no details of the Enable programme or the equivalent plans for governors. New training must concentrate on what Professor Alison Liebling calls the moral climate in prisons. In her summary of a lifetime researching best practice: ”Aristotle‘s Prison”, Oxford, 2026, she finds “….there are strong links between humanity, the quality of staff-prisoner relationships, fairness, order, safety and prisoner well-being. Survivable prisons are responsive, attentive, fair and well organised, but few reach this state or remain in it for long.” Unlocked Graduates has produced what could be called the manual for creating the right moral climate “The Unlocked Guide to Jail Craft”. This must be essential reading for prison staff and managers.

Experience needs to be valued and grown; centralised recruitment does not deliver the best staff for the circumstances in each prison. The guidance prompts for this question display the curse of ‘there has to be evidence’ – it’s blindingly obvious you get better recruitment if governors have a say in it. Preliminary findings from the Vanguard project at Wandsworth suggests that locally selected staff with dedicated training and greater autonomy can achieve better outcomes. If the full evaluation of this project continues to show improved outcomes, the lessons should be rolled out as a matter of urgency. And of course HMPPS, with a vested interest in the centralised model, set up a pilot at HMP Berwyn so they could say the devolved model failed.

Give Governors back a major chunk of the budget and the power to spend it, with -for example -the countersignature of their divisional controller. Support local initiatives and don’t cancel them when they work. Funding for the successful Remand Project at Wandsworth was cancelled and then reinstated. Until recently, funding for the widely-praised Leavers Lounge was uncertain. Increasing the Governor’s discretionary budget by even a small amount (we believe the Wandsworth Governor has a discretionary budget of only £10k) would help support activities which have been shown to make a positive difference.

Embrace working with volunteers and the third sector; reinstate Unlocked Graduates and the effective volunteers  who have been barred for no reason from HMP Wandsworth. Create a training package and qualification for volunteers who could then work in the prison for social partners. Some third sector organisations do great work in prisons but this feels increasingly difficult. Prisons should be positively encouraged to solicit and accept offers of help from local organisations eg Rotary Club could sponsor improvements to the exercise yard. Setting up a visitor scheme to enable local people to volunteer to visit would help support prisoners, especially foreign nationals, and enable more of the public to understand what life is like inside prisons. Far more could be done with IT: ACCTs should be paperless. Adapt the Justice Transcribe system for prisons and probation so that oral notes from an officer and body worn camera evidence could be used to create accurate ACCT reports. Buy a bigger server of this is the issue with not using IT more. Reduce time on roll calls etc. and flag up issues on the PER and SASH forms into one document that goes straight into NOMIS and SystmOne. NOMIS and SystmOne should interface smoothly, if prisoners grant permission. AI should play a key part in release processes.

Theme 5 – safety and decency

Question 11- risks to safety and decency

All prisoners should be treated with respect, like human beings, not caged animals.  No prisoner should be locked up for more than 12 hours on any day. Cells should not have a toilet next to the bed. Surely that could be an ambition for this Government?

The basics of showers, hot water, changes of clothes, freedom from vermin, temperature control, and ventilation need constant attention, and are often at risk. Better food, eaten together, is also essential.

Treating families with respect is an aspect of prison decency. It is well known that contact with families reduces reoffending, but often families feel the rules for visits and phone calls make this difficult. Potential quick wins are:  simplify the rules to make it easier for families to hand in clothing, eg don’t require an application from a prisoner; make it easier for prisoners to phone families. The recent reduction in call rates is welcome, but more could be done; facilitate the use of diversion services, in a way which does not compromise public protection, by working with providers; enable incoming calls to cells; expand the use of iPads for prisons; eliminate delays in prisoners receiving their PIN numbers; encourage prisoners to make a note of family telephone numbers before having their mobile phones confiscated at reception; repair in-cell phones without delay rather than at the provider’s convenience; Governors should ensure the vulnerable prisoners on ACCTs can always make phone calls; refurbish and improve visitor facilities and make sure they are kept clean and tidy, for example the visits hall and PACT house at Wandsworth  could be refurbished using the inhouse painting and maintenance team and external organisations willing to help

Loss of property is a risk to decency and shows a lack of respect. It is distressing and frustrating for prisoners when a few precious possessions such as photos of their children and court papers go missing when they move cells or prisons. This has been highlighted by IMBs and the Ombudsman. Again, make use of everyday IT tools to implement a system for tracking property which works and make sure prison staff use it.

Loss of clothing when clothing is sent to the prison laundry is a constant source of complaint. More effort could be made to reduce thefts by the permanent marking and naming of clothes.

Gang related and drug related violence are risks. Violence is driven by frustration and poor regimes which means prisoners have little distraction and have to make choices between showers, exercise, library and domestics; a system that leaves its occupants so imprisoned and bored that they have nowhere to turn but illicit drink, drugs and the excitement of smuggling, and who leave the system as addicts, better qualified in crime than they arrived, is a major risk to safety. The present system fosters addictions rather than eases or releases people from them.

Question 12 – opportunities to improve safety and decency

The main opportunities to improve prison safety and decency are: Require body worn cameras to be switched on as a default. The policy should be consistent and adhered to. In our experience prisoners would not object to this. In Wandsworth, enable the roof vents on the 4th floors to be opened independently of the fire alarms to prevent overheating. Require SERCO to deliver prisoners earlier in the day to enable completion of vital first night checks. Deliver more out of cell activities on the wings: staff shortages mean that frequently men cannot be taken to classes or to the library. A pragmatic response is to deliver more activities on the wings. Existing examples are yoga classes and chess club. These could be extended, for example to: Fitness activities – in Wandsworth the two gyms and sports facilities are only accessible when the regime allows, and book trolleys used to be widely available on the wings but not any longer. Within any prison the talent and skills of prisoners should be used to undertake repainting, and small maintenance jobs on the building and on furniture etc. Incentivise the use of book trollies and book clubs on the wings, support literacy drives. Teach craft activities so men can take a pride in making small items they can give to their family members. Trust prisoners to have knitting needles and crochet hooks.

Sheer boredom, dirty living conditions, a lack of interest in or from anyone, all lead to violence and self harm. Staff must be trained to show professional curiosity when prisoners ask for help, or change behaviour, or appear distressed; too often we’ve heard reliance on terms like ‘attention seeker’, ‘manipulative’, ‘has complex issues’, all used to push a prisoner out of sight and avoid investigation. Everything should be done to lower the numbers of men in prison whilst keeping enough staff to increase the quality of interaction and encourage rehabilitation.

More provision on every wing is needed for men to cook communally and eat communally with more teaching emphasis on health and nutrition. This is pro-social and good for health. Simple tests for peripheral circulation could be used to assess fitness on admission to prison and combined with regular health checks to prevent deterioration in fitness; with men involved in discussing their own health, their medication and in planning outcomes, teaching responsibility for their own health. Scrutinise the contracts to major food providers eg Bidfood for quality and value for money. Allow Governors the budget to spend more with local suppliers.

A  duty of candour should be brought in for prison officers and healthcare staff. The NHS needs to ensure prison healthcare is comparable to care in the community, as it is supposed to be, and ensure the health needs of the mentally ill and the elderly are met.

The third sector should be harnessed and HMPPS should stop penny pinching over their contracts. The goodwill and generosity of the general public and volunteers should also be harnessed.

IT in prison is often so poor that people cannot or do not log in to the systems they are allowed to see. The hardware is so primitive and broken it cannot be used. Men are so restricted from access to the internet that they lose (or never acquire) the skills and the access to education that the prison is not providing in other forms. Without experience and practice in the digital world they are released unfit and out of synch with the outside world, and even more unable to get work. 

Theme 6 – rehabilitation and reducing reoffending

Question 13 – risks which prevent rehabilitation and reducing reoffending

All the points we have made above. Chiefly lack of time out of cell and activities, training and education; difficulties for families to maintain contact and support their loved ones (clothing parcels, phone calls, visits). Also, probation failures, mental health failures by NHS, failure to provide for release, too many Early Release schemes that are panic measures and not thought through.

Question 14 – activities and interventions in prisons to improve rehabilitation and reduce reoffending

Time out of cell must be increased. Prisons should collect and report  data on time out of cell  (in addition to time spent in activities) and time out of cell  does not seem to have improved since the pandemic low point; much more purposeful activity and training is needed (evidence from HMP Wandsworth suggests this needs more prison staff to escort men to activities); deliver more activities on the wings if that is the only way; do everything possible to help families maintain contact and support; use talents within the prison to undertake repairs and maintenance; use technology to tag people more effectively so they can be released earlier, or perhaps not given custodial sentences in the first place.

Probation needs to be involved much earlier in planning for release, including planning for prisoners’ accommodation needs. For those serving long sentences there has to be good digital preparation for returning to society to mitigate the Rip Van Winkle effect of so much technology change since they went inside. More free terminals would allow access to teaching packages so that men can learn the academic background to skills - they could do an advanced driving theory test, they could do food and nutrition qualifications, they could even do theory papers in plumbing and electrical skills -access to any open university course they want to try. Daytime TV that is self chosen but educative. Much more support is needed for those third sector and private companies who work in prisons eg Redemption Roasters or who employ ex-prisoners, there should be tax breaks or tax holidays for those employers.

 

Theme 7 Women's Prisons

Question 15. What are the biggest risks facing women’s prisons within the English and Welsh justice system, including risks that may affect outcomes for women during custody and following release?

With fewer women held in prison, women prisoners are likely to be further and further away from their home territory and friends and family. We perhaps need more but smaller units specialising in working with and reintegration into the surrounding community, and fostering interactions from that community. In a recent case  a woman released on parole who had to live miles from home and family and friends and who relapsed and was recalled.

Question 16. What changes to the custodial estate and targeted interventions would have the greatest impact on improving outcomes for women over the next five to 15 years?

No comment.

Theme 8 – different cohorts

Question 17 - which cohorts have specific needs and vulnerabilities in prison?

Mentally ill, addicts, elderly, transgender prisoners, disabled, neuro-diverse, ethnic minorities, travellers, foreign nationals who do not understand English, those awaiting deportation with no end in sight, IPP  and JE prisoners facing long sentences for minimal involvement in crime, sex offenders who need more specialist help addressing the origins and triggers for their behaviour so that they are released better able to cope. They also need information and help about life at release.

Question 18 – Changes needed to address the needs of different cohorts

Only imprisoning people where it is necessary and/or likely to result in a better long-term outcome for the individual imprisoned and for society.  Prison is not the appropriate place for many of those with specific needs and vulnerabilities. 

Other changes include officer training and recognition of needs; suitable alternative places for the severely mentally ill; more understanding and compassion for what a sexual offence is, and the range of offences in this category. At the moment sex offenders are the pariahs of the prison system, living under constant threat from other prisoners, and scorn and a lack of care from officers. Whilst some have been extremely dangerous and damaging, many have engaged in lower level crime -unpleasant and threatening but not life altering. Many perpetrators are the victims of sexual offences and have themselves been brutalised. Their chances of a normal life at release are poor. They are a group scorned and, in some ways, rejected by all, even prison reformers. We have to work on society’s knowledge of the range of offences that fall within the single banner and also work with the offenders so they understand the damage they do to others, and the damage that has been done to them. We need to find ways to restore these human beings in the eyes of humanity.  They are an unpopular group to advocate for, but ways to improve their treatment and prevent such crime are essential.

Theme 9 – technology and digital tools

Question 19 – what further role should technology play?

Again, your guidance asks for evidence where probably none exists or would be costly to create. Why? The benefits of further use of technology are staggeringly obvious. For example: drone disruption, paper work reduction: Voice Activated technology for making accurate and timely reports, better systems at reception, courts etc so that all records are always accessible and easily seen. IT and other admin should be there at weekends; roll call assistance; tagging to achieve punishment without prison, atmosphere and waste water sampling for drugs; monitoring fitness levels at entry and exit and in between; an AI key worker could probably do a better job of talking sensibly and sympathetically to prisoners than some officers. Systems are also needed for tracking prisoners’ property (lost property is a major cause of frustration – PPO report); HMPPS needs to overcome a tendency of the public sector to over-complicate IT in pursuit of the perfect solution.

But safeguards are needed: prisoners should be able to challenge a record used by a prison in making a decision about his future. Officers are not always well trained or fair minded. Records are made on a prisoners file without discussion and may not always be an accurate record. If AI is used based on such incidents, biased accounts of past happenings may become fixed drivers for a prisoner’s future.

Theme 10 – best practice

Question 20 – best practice in England and Wales

Ask the Chief Inspector to send you a list of their top 10 examples of best practice. HMIP is very keen for prisons to share what works.

The Vanguard Wing at HMP Wandsworth and Natasha Porter’s excellent work has attracted very recent comment. We have visited it, it’s a brilliant initiative and if the monitoring results support it should be rolled out to other prisons as soon as possible.

Charities like the Wandsworth Prisons Welfare Trust should be encouraged. WPWT provides financial help and support, and fosters interest from the community around its prison. The WPWT provides art and craft materials, clothes and phones and oyster cards for men at release through the “release cupboard” attached to the “departure lounge”. Damningly, WPWT has spent £1500 in the last year supplying sleeping bags for prisoners who are being released in the full knowledge that they will be homeless.  It can help out a prison struggling to buy something like a new mosque carpet, or yoga lessons, things not seen as an essential, but things which will reduce tension and bring calm. Such charities bring with them links into schools and local societies and allow much bigger discussion about the rehabilitation of offenders, the need for open minded employers and fair minded landlords. They get offers from ordinary people who wish to help. We need these community links if men are not to step out of prison into a world they have lost any connection with, and which seems to have rushed passed them uncaringly.

Question 21 – best practice in Northern Ireland, Scotland and overseas

Many good examples of prison best practice exist in Nordic countries, the Netherlands and in some U.S. states. These should be actively studied. We also need to understand the regulatory environment that some of the best practice overseas regimes operate within for the learning that could be applied here.

Question 22 - What, if any, additional evidence should the Review consider?

Why is this Call for Evidence ignoring the recent reviews carried out by Andy Slaughter MP and Lord Foster's committees such as their work on drugs and “Better Prisons Less Crime”? The latter report by the House of Lords made grave criticisms of the leadership of HMPPS. The weak management and incompetence complained of is perfectly illustrated by the sad story of the redirection of £100m to HMP Wandsworth over 5 years, announced with some fanfare by the then Lord Chancellor (now Home Secretary) on 6 August 2024. Two years later, about £5m has actually been spent, as we explain below.

Ever since the announcement in August 2024 it has been regularly stated by the MoJ and HMPPS as a fact that Wandsworth will be the lucky recipient of an extra £100m.  It has remained confused, uncertain and opaque when this money would actually be spent and what it would be spent on.

Confusion and uncertainty was confirmed and added to by answers given by representatives of HMPPS before the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee on 9 June 2026.  At question 14 of the transcript Cohen Lewis, Deputy Director for HMPPS Estates, Safety, and Litigation, stated, “I would disagree with you slightly that we have not done anything. We have spent £100 million on healthcare and CCTV and site-wide shower upgrades [at HMP Wandsworth], with the fire safety elements now starting, but it does take time to mobilise those projects.” Mr Lewis asserted that this £100 million pounds included the healthcare centre. Later in the Committee’s session Mr Lewis stated, “This might be a good point for me to issue a correction for the record. That £100 million is inclusive of the fire safety works planned at Wandsworth.”  James McEwen, CEO of HMPPS then intervened to state that, “Seventeen million pounds has been spent so far from a total planned investment across Wandsworth, not just K Wing, but yes.” This is a total shambles.  There is no apparent differentiation made by HMPPS between money spent and money planned to be spent.  Numbers appear to be spouted to parliament without any care for accuracy or attempt at precision as to what is and isn’t included.  The healthcare centre stated to be part of the £100 million was planned well before the announcement of the extra £100 million and was in fact substantially complete in 2021.  It cannot be part of a claimed extra £100 million to be spent after August 2024.  The healthcare centre is understood to have cost about £12 million.  Mr McEwen stated before the Committee that £17 million has actually been spent, apparently including this £12 million.  This suggests that in the nearly two years since the announcement of an extra £100 million over 5 years, approximately £5 million pounds has actually been spent. This point has been put to HMPPS and not refuted.