The criminal justice system was within days of collapse on three occasions before being bailed out by “last-minute emergency measures”, an independent review by a former prisons watchdog has found.
Dame Anne Owers said the prison system, under pressure from overcrowding, was “in crisis” between autumn 2023 and the summer of 2024, but No 10 under Rishi Sunak refused to cut the numbers in jail until “the next predictable cliff edge”.
Former ministers and officials interviewed by Owers “expressed frustration and sometimes anger” at the failure to endorse a plan to avert crises and suspected that this was a deliberate move by Downing Street, she said.
“Many believed that the default position was to do as little as possible as late as possible, with the consequence that the system repeatedly reached the brink of collapse,” she said.
The 25-page report into the teetering Prison Service, which remains at nearly 97.5% capacity, comes as the criminal justice system is expected to come under renewed pressure this weekend.
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The review, commissioned by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in February, detailed claims that Sunak’s office waited until prisons were days from collapsing before acting – to the dismay of some ministers.
“Although departmental ministers were convinced by mid-2023 that some form of early release was both necessary and urgent, this required prime ministerial agreement, which was not forthcoming until the system was within three days of potential collapse, and only in incremental stages,” she wrote.
She said Alex Chalk, the then justice secretary, called for an early release scheme from mid-2023 for prisoners who had received standard determinate sentences, but received no backing.
Chalk had made clear, she said, that he “was advocating, without success, a version of the SDS early release scheme in order to get ahead of the crisis, rather than the minimal salami-slicing approach that was eventually taken”.
“Without exception, all those the review spoke to expressed frustration and sometimes anger at the reluctance to accept and then act on the well-documented and imminent crisis, or to agree any coherent plan to avert it,” she wrote.
After the general election was called in May 2024, Sunak called emergency Cobra meetings to discuss “invoking emergency powers” to release prisoners early if the criminal justice system collapsed.
“This might be necessary to avert the risk of public disorder if the criminal justice system collapsed during the election campaign,” the report disclosed.
On three occasions, the Sunak government used early release schemes, employing powers designed to allow release on compassionate grounds, the report said.
Civil servants were concerned that there would be an investigation into the mismanagement of prisons, the report said.
“Senior officials were so concerned about a potential breakdown in the criminal justice system that an audit was kept of all decision-making and documents, in case there was a public or parliamentary inquiry,” the report found.
In October 2023, Chalk announced plans to free prisoners 18 days early under the end of custody supervised licence, which was later extended to 35 days and then 70 days. More than 13,000 were released under the scheme.
One of Labour’s first acts after forming a government last year was to announce a plan to release offenders with standard determinate sentences after they had served 40% of their term.
Recommendations from David Gauke’s sentencing review, which proposed less jail time for thousands of offenders, including some violent criminals and domestic abusers, are in the process of being implemented.
Commenting on the Owers report, Mahmood said it “lays bare the disgraceful way the last Conservative government ran our prisons. They added less than 500 cells to the prison estate over 14 years, released over 10,000 prisoners early under a veil of secrecy, and brought our jails close to total collapse on countless occasions.”
The Conservatives and Sunak have been approached for comment.
Andrew Neilson, the director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “This review into prison capacity spells out in forensic detail how the government has found itself facing the prospect of running out of cells. It is a crisis, or more accurately a series of crises, that has been brewing over several decades and across successive governments.”
