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

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, having just joined the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, I support this report and particularly commend the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for the way he introduced it. I thought he was direct, unsparing and fair. I am sure that this Minister in particular will take its central message: that it is all about implementation and the clock is ticking, and it has been ticking for many years. That is a very fair comment.

All political parties represented in this Chamber need to understand the context that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, described, which is that not one of them has gone into in a general election promising lower sentences or more remission. This Government have done something about remission, but those two facts have driven the prison population to an unsustainable level, as well as the context in which this report is delivered. We have to acknowledge that.

I wish to talk about two subjects relating to this report; first, about the complex and difficult problem of staff corruption, and then about the tagging of prisoners on release from prison. The vast majority of prison staff serve in a difficult role with integrity. However, there are issues of corruption with some staff, which appear to have increased over the last few years. The report identifies some of the challenges with the present recruitment process, for example. It is difficult to estimate the scale of the problem. However, there are two significant symptoms of it. One is the wide availability of mobile phones in the prison estate. This is really important. We are getting murders arranged from prison, drugs supply continued and firearms discovered. It is vital that this is controlled. The second is the fact that drugs are available in prison, leading to more people leaving with a drug habit than entered with one—on average, this rises from around 40% on entry to 60% on leaving.

Of course, both forms of contraband can be delivered by drones or visitors, but the penetration being achieved in phones and drugs indicates significant elements of collusion. The problem is increasing, because there is an ineffective system for investigating the intelligence being gathered. I blame no one for this problem, because it is caused by a basic flaw in the system. The Prison Service does not have an investigative arm with the necessary powers, including overt and covert surveillance mechanisms, within the community outside prisons. The police do have the powers but require a high degree of certainty before they start a resource-intensive investigation. Therefore, because the Prison Service does not have an investigative arm, it struggles to get the evidence to persuade the police to investigate this serious crime. This problem is aggravated in rural areas, where many prisons are located, which are often covered by small police forces that generally do not have the resources to investigate the most serious crimes. This means there is an increasingly high bar to commence an investigation.

Local prisons in urban areas face a different problem: the prison staff often share schools, licensed premises and so on with the families and associates of prisoners, which adds further pressure on discipline and staff integrity. The overall problem could be eased by providing a national squad of police officers, supported by prison staff, to investigate intelligence in the prison and in the community, combining prison and police intelligence, powers and skills. At the moment, there is no such unit and everybody is deprioritising this vital area. If we want to continue the prison staff professionalism that this report argues for, a foundation of integrity and basic security in the system is vital. At the moment, for the reasons I have described, I fear it is seriously challenged.

I move briefly to tagging, which the Minister and I have discussed before and which we agree is a vital opportunity for the future when prisoners are released. It starts to control some of the factors that cause prisoners to continue to reoffend. We now have geolocation, which can exclude prisoners from certain areas or maintain them within one. There is sobriety tagging, which manages whether someone is taking drugs or, more often, alcohol as a precursor to their offending pattern. The Minister will know that there have been problems in fitting these devices on leaving prison. The commercial company involved has not always been able to do it—that is not always its fault, but it has not always happened. Probably more importantly, the data produced by the tags is not shared live with the local police, who could do something about the breaches, particularly if a crime has just been committed. In any case, it is vital that this is looked at.

These two areas are vital: prison corruption—I blame no one for that, certainly not prison staff—and tagging. Could the Minister update us on both in his reply?