Prison Services: Insourcing

Lord Timpson Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

On behalf of my noble friend Lord Woodley, and with his permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)]

This Government inherited a well-advanced plan to outsource contracts after a 2023 Cabinet Office assessment concluded that in-house capability was not sufficient to make insourcing viable. Insourcing would be reliant on retaining staff from current suppliers, but labour market constraints and public sector pay rates were not likely to be attractive. Outsource providers consistently exceed the targets set and outperform GFSL across the majority of KPIs. My job now is to ensure best value for money from these new contracts until 2031, when we will reconsider all options for future provision.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that Answer. As a former trade union leader, I have seen time and again what privatisation does. The public end up paying a higher price for poorer-quality service while private profits soar. Prisons are no exception, with outsourced maintenance and education examples of a lack of value for public money. Retendering these contracts is, I believe, a mistake. Can my noble friend the Minister therefore instead make the case for the Prison Service to benefit from a wave of insourcing?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The decision to outsource maintenance contracts was based on a detailed Cabinet Office assessment that concluded that the MoJ did not have the in-house capability to deliver the desired services, and that achieving this in the same timescale would have been costly and would not offer value for money to the taxpayer. Our intention is to look at the options of insourcing again in 2031. The majority of core teaching is delivered by public sector organisations and many smaller organisations, including voluntary sector providers, are delivering bespoke, locally commissioned courses. This diversity of expertise gives flexibility to meet the needs of prisoners, ensuring they have the skills they need to succeed. I will ensure that we continue to drive for innovation and improvements in the way we deliver education, including the role of digital, in achieving the best outcomes for prisoners.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord’s Government were elected on a promise of 50% of all food being sourced locally to prisons, hospitals, schools and other such local bodies. How close are they to meeting that target?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble Baroness will be pleased to know that the prison industry actually grows £1.7 million in value of our own vegetables and fruit. We also do laundry services for all prisons, as we do for immigration removal centres and the police service. We also make everything there is in a prison cell apart from TVs, which we fix, mattresses, which we are working on, and kettles and pillows—but we are working on how to do that ourselves. We are trying to do an awful lot in-house, but there is more to be done.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that there are two particular areas that might benefit from insourcing when the review is undertaken? One area is tagging: this could easily be undertaken within prisons by prison staff. Numbers of prisoners have been released untagged into the community, causing risk to the public and potentially leading to unnecessary recalls when appointments are subsequently missed. The other area is prisoner transport to courts, where frequent failures have led to multiple court delays and increased backlogs. Could this too be better organised within the prison system?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises two important points, which I have been very focused on since I took on this role. I am a commercial person, so I have been interested in getting into the detail on this. On PECS—the prisoner transport contracts—the performance levels are exceptionally high but, when things go wrong, often it is not down to the PECS providers; it is down to our own self-inflicted problems at the prison. With regard to electronic monitoring, we inherited a problematic contract and, although it is performing much better now, there is still some way to go. Serco’s leadership team has been in my office a number of times and we are working really well together. I recently visited its Warrington office and saw its performance, which really is improving. What we need to do is get to a point where the service that it delivers is excellent.

[Lord Woolf (CB)]

My Lords, is it not the Minister’s experience that prisons are unlike the outside world and, as I found when I was giving my report into prisons, it is very important to understand those differences? Is there not a danger, if we do not continue to allow prisons to look after their own affairs, wherever possible, that they will not be looked after even as well as they are now?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I can only play the ball that is in front of me. What I am trying to do is to make sure that our prisons run excellently. It is very much a hybrid model of the voluntary, private and public sectors. I will give the noble and learned Lord one good example. We imprison lots of people who have skills we could use in a prison, and it is important that we use more of them. We have two schemes—one called Q-Branch, the another called CRED—operating in 70 prisons, where about 750 prisoners are employed each month. In HMP Lewes, the team repainted and sorted out all the floors, saving huge amounts of money. So I want to see more prisoners doing more work in prisons.

[Lord Keen of Elie (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that publicly managed prisons are not delivering better rehabilitation outcomes than privately managed prisons?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble and learned Lord raises a really important question on how the performance differs between public and private sector prisons. It is something I have been interested in for a long time. I can show you some excellent private sector prisons and some excellent public sector prisons, and I think we need to learn from each other where we have areas of excellence and of poor performance. One thing I look out for is the quality of leadership in a prison. It does not matter whether it is a public sector prison or a private sector prison. I believe that too much of the performance of a prison is dependent on one leader, and that is the situation in both types of prison.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister says that the Prison Service has not got the capacity at the present time. Will he take between now and when the new contract is due to go out again to build capacity in the Prison Service, so that it can actually compete with the private sector?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble Lord will be well aware that we have lots of maintenance issues in our prisons, 25% of which are Victorian. In HMP Preston, the first governor was appointed in 1790, and in 1791 at HMP Lewes. Dealing with the maintenance on those is very complex and often requires a hybrid model, because we are dealing with lifts, fire systems and often very complicated things. In December last year, we published our 10-year capacity strategy, which aims to make sure we have enough prison places for the prisoners that we will hold.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, prisons are not devolved to Wales, but education is. To what extent is there full co-operation between the Home Office and the Welsh Government, with regard to maximising the role that the educational services, under the Welsh Senedd, can play in education in Welsh prisons?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

Across the English and Welsh prisons, we have 270 local contracts, with 88 education suppliers, including many voluntary organisations. I have regular meetings and conversations with Welsh colleagues as well. Even though I live just over the border in England, when I wake up in the morning and open my curtains, I can see a Welsh prison: HMP Berwyn.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I urge the Minister to draw on local government experiences around private provision and insourcing. I think what is really important is how the contract is drawn up and—more importantly—how that contract is managed, to make sure that we get the best outcomes for our prisoners, so they are rehabilitated when they come out of prison, and also so there is value for taxpayers.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I completely agree. Having run a business for a long time, and paid a lot of tax, I am very aware that I want it spent wisely. Let me give one example: BT does the majority of our phone contracts in our prisons, for prisoners to make calls to family and friends. I managed to reduce the cost of those calls by 20% by working with BT, and I think holding suppliers to account is part of my job. Maybe they do not like to come and sit in my office, but they frequently do and I challenge them to ensure we get good value for money.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister quite rightly mentioned the importance of leadership. Did he see a recent report regarding two prison governors, who put out a statement saying they were going to introduce drugs-free wings? Why are there drugs in prisons? Surely it is an absolute aberration for governors to be talking in those terms. We should be removing all drugs from prisons.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that drugs are a huge problem: 49% of prisoners who arrive in prison declare to us that they are addicted to drugs and alcohol. We then put them in prison with many serious organised criminals, who make their livelihood from supplying drugs. That is where we have the problem. We need more drug-free living wings. They are important and they help people turn their lives around. I also agree that we need to trust our governors and our leaders in prisons to make the right decisions for their prisoners.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government are clearly very fortunate to have my noble friend the Minister in this vital role, with his commercial and prison-reform expertise. Following the intervention made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, when the Minister is considering the 2031 review, will he think not just about the commercial, value-for-money aspects but about the constitutional aspects of privatised incarceration and coercion as well?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for the question. What is really important is that we make sure that we hold all operators to account between now and 2031. This applies to us, running 115 prison sites, and to the private sector. Hopefully there will be announcements soon on the direction we will be going in.