Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends and noble Lords on their excellent maiden speeches. I look forward to those to come and welcome them to the House. I thank the chair and the witnesses and contributors who helped produce this excellent and detailed report. I share the disappointment that has been expressed about the Ministry of Justice’s response. It was complacent, generalised and lacking the urgency that this topic demands, notwithstanding, as has been said, our confidence in the Minister.

Prison imposes the most severe power of the state, the deprivation of liberty, for three reasons: to punish offenders, to protect the public and to reduce reoffending through rehabilitation. However, because prison is failing to reduce reoffending, it is also failing fully to protect the public. The prison system is now in a parlous state after years of neglect. Prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, ineffective and very costly, not only financially but in the damage inflicted on communities. Nearly half of all prisoners on average are reconvicted within a year. The Sentencing Act may help, but it does not obviate the need for radical reform of the prison system.

I will focus on a few key priorities in the report. The first is leadership. The head of an institution is usually the most important factor in determining its culture, effectiveness and efficiency, and they can be held to account if they have the autonomy to do what is required. In the Prison Service, that is not the case. The top-down control by HMPPS stifles innovation and weakens governors’ ability to manage effectively. These findings are mirrored by reports from the other place and the chief inspector. Governors are accountable but not empowered.

The government response claims that governors do have some flexibility, but that does not reflect what many governors told us: that lack of autonomy was one of their main areas of frustration and needs transformational change. In what other spheres of public or private services is it thought that rigid centralised control is the best way to achieve effectiveness and efficiency? It is not true in education, the police, health or even private prisons. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that there needs to be a step change in governor autonomy and how does he propose to increase operational and strategic freedoms for governors?

The second point is workforce, which includes myriad issues. I agree that most prison officers and support staff are doing their best in difficult circumstances, but there is, nevertheless, a daunting list of workforce challenges that must be addressed, including recruitment, performance management, training, appraisal, line management, sickness absence and so on. It is astounding that prison officers are recruited via an online process, as we have heard, and that governors do not meet new recruits before they turn up for work. Would that be regarded as acceptable for a teacher, social worker or police officer? I think not. There is at best a patchy system of training, virtually no system of appraisal and little supervision, with line managers expected to manage 20 to 30 officers.

We hear almost daily about workforce problems, including corruption—as we have just heard—hundreds of prisoners released in error and allegations of staff misconduct, including with children in secure units, yet the committee was given very little detail and perceived no real sense of urgency from the Ministry of Justice. It said this was a work in progress. Can my noble friend the Minister set out how he is approaching this fundamental programme of change and what his priorities are?

The third point is reducing reoffending through purposeful activity. This could be said to be the raison-d’être of the prison system, yet it repeatedly fails to deliver education and remedial programmes. Prison becomes a very expensive waste of money, by failing to reduce the likelihood of reoffending on release. There is limited availability of and access to provision. Attendance is not prioritised against the demands of prison routines or staffing problems, and it falls by the wayside. Could my noble friend the Minister give further details about what work is going on to improve this situation?

Finally, I will mention women in prison, where there are very high levels of need and vulnerability, 71% reoffending, high levels of trauma, substance abuse and so on. This discrete and very vulnerable subset of the prison population is in particularly urgent need of the recommendations in our report. Will my noble friend consider accelerating those recommendations in the women’s estate?

These are just a few issues. Setting all the others aside, they alone are incredibly challenging. I genuinely do not doubt my noble friend’s ability and commitment to the changes necessary, but, with the greatest respect, his task will be even more difficult unless he can build a more capable, flexible and innovative HMPPS.