POA National Chair slams the UK government's plan to tackle overcrowding crisis in Britain's prisons

Every single prison in Britain is currently unsafe, the national chair of the prison workers’ union has warned with brutal and overcrowded conditions highlighting a crumbling system.

Prison safety and overcrowding go hand in hand, as Mark Fairhurst of the POA union told LFF that by the end of this week, there will most likely be no space left at all at men’s prisons in the UK. 

It comes as the UK government predicted last week that prisons would be ‘full by Easter’ however Fairhurst believed this was “very optimistic”. 

“If we have another big week, that’s us full,” Fairhurst told LFF. “The more people you put in prison the higher the prisoner to staff ratio the less time we get to spend with people, so if you’re in a prison designed to hold 900 prisoners and it’s currently holding 1,600 you can see the pressure that’s increased on everyone.”

In response to the overcrowding crisis the justice secretary announced plans to release offenders up to two months early, but Fairhurst was not convinced. 

“It will take a couple of weeks to process, you haven’t got enough admin staff to do it in a timely manner and you certainly haven’t got enough probation staff to supervise people getting released early in the community,” said Fairhurst, who has worked in prisons since 1992. 

“So I can see the recalls increasing, new crimes being committed and I can’t see it making much difference at all.”

His biggest fear is that it’s a rush job, “have the risk assessments been thoroughly examined and are we releasing the right people who aren’t going to be a risk to the public?”

As Fairhurst sees it, at the heart of the matter is a failure from successive governments to invest in the prison service, however he highlighted that the Tories have seen its funding cut to the bone.

“We can’t accept any more cuts because there is nothing more to cut,” he stressed. 

Since the Tories came into power, he said the prison sector has had to save over £900 billion, £37m will have to be saved this financial year alone to cope with underfunding. 

“Instead of investing in the prisons, they shut them. They promised by 2025 we’d have an additional 20,000 prison spaces and they’ve only increased that by 6,000, so they’ve failed on every level.”

For the party that has repeatedly claimed to ‘restore law and order’ and be ‘tough on crime’, its failure to invest in lasting solutions holds dangerous implications, and at the cost of billions to the taxpayer. 

Prisoners are now being housed in police cells, hugely costly, untenable and leading to dire conditions. A glaring lack of interest in prisoner rehabilitation has done nothing to reduce reoffending. 

Fairhurst stressed “a lot of thought needs to go into how and why we bang people up” as he stressed the need to modernise prisons, which are currently “decrepit” and “falling down”. As well as finding solutions like robust community service, however, a current shortage of probation staff due to high workload and poor pay would hold this back.

For prison staff, the recruitment crisis is dire, with a survey by POA finding over 42% intended to leave the Prison Service within five years, as increased violence on top of poor pay and a high pension age are all deterring factors. 

“Why would anyone want to work in the most hostile environment workplace of anywhere in the world, up to the age of 68?” said Fairhurst. 

29 MPs have signed an Early Days Motion condemning a razor attack on a prison officer in February, noting the ‘alarming rising tide of prison violence since the end of pandemic lockdowns’.

“Last week we had a serious attack on a prison officer and he’s still in an induced coma with a bleed on the brain. At the weekend we had a member of staff stabbed in the throat with a pen, violence continues and it’s escalating,” said Fairhurst.

He added: “You’re putting two people in cells designed for one, you don’t have additional facilities, you’ve got to make more meals in the kitchen, you don’t put in more staff, you’ve got to cope. It’s pretty grim.”

The union has also campaigned to end prison privatisation and bring them all back into the public sector, as Fairhurst said “you can’t run prisons for profit because profit will always come above safety”.

Nationalising the sector is one the demands the union will put to Labour for its manifesto. Along with restoring prison workers’ right to strike and bringing the retirement age back down from 68 to 60. 

The union has recently put in a pay submission for its members asking for a 8.3% increase across pay in line with RPI at the time of submission, plus 3%. 

Although POA members are banned by law from taking strike action, that hasn’t stopped them before, as Fairhurst said the union was fined £200,000 for breaking the high court injunction after he walked his members out in 2018 over pay and was threatened with jail if he did it again. 

However he said “it doesn’t stop me.”

“As I said to the prison minister at the time, you threaten me with jail but all my members will be outside on strike so who’s going to bang me up? it didn’t go down very well.”

Hannah Davenport is news reporter at Left Foot Forward, focusing on trade unions and environmental issues

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