On the edge of the English town of Wellingborough, the future of Britain’s creaking prison system is marked by seven X-shaped blocks. When opened in 2022, HMP Five Wells — about 70 miles north of London — was heralded as the first of a new generation of “smart” prisons that would help modernize an outdated and severely overcrowded estate.
Its 1,694 “residents” — not inmates — live in “rooms,” not cells, fitted with their own shower. Secure windows that avoid the need for old-fashioned metal bars adorn the £253 million facility — the fifth biggest prison by numbers in the UK. A gym, workshops and table tennis offer prisoners, most serving sentences for non-violent offenses, a glimpse of the life they might enjoy once they leave.
This rehabilitative approach has been championed by the new prisons minister James Timpson, appointed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer within hours of the Labour Party’s landslide election win in July. Timpson, the former chief executive officer of the eponymous key-cutting and shoe-repair company, has previously argued that the UK should jail fewer people, hand out shorter sentences, and offer greater mental health support to offenders. Ex-prisoners make up around 10% of employees at Timpson Ltd.
His political boss — Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood — said Five Wells pointed “the way to a different future” in a speech at the prison in July, when she laid out emergency plans for the early release of thousands of prisoners to ease the capacity crisis gripping the system.
But the ambitions of the G4S-run prison are running up against the realities of Britain’s modern justice system. The opening of what’s been sneeringly dubbed “Britain’s cushiest prison” by tabloid media, has been mired by drugs use, staff dismissals and criticism from the regulator around an “inadequate” education program.
The financial, political and social stresses around prisons — and the potential danger they pose to the Starmer government — were vividly exposed within weeks of Labour taking power when a series of riots, some prompted by far-right protesters targeting migration hostels, broke out across the country. Almost 1,300 people were arrested, close to 800 charged and more than 120 jailed after Starmer insisted that there would be swift justice for those involved. That demand has further stretched a court network dealing with a post-pandemic backlog of cases and a prison system close to breaking point with few spaces left in an overflowing, outdated and staff-starved prison estate.
The government has introduced an early release program which saw 1,700 prisoners freed on Tuesday to reduce pressure on the system. But it is a gamble for a government wary of the potential for a tabloid media backlash the first time one of those released prisoners commits a more serious offense. “I’m angry to be put in a position of having to release people who should be in prison because the last government broke the prison system,” Starmer told parliament on Wednesday.
The prime minister’s other problem is that he doesn’t have the money to fix it. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said she needs to plug a £22 billion black hole in the government’s finances ahead of the budget on Oct.30. And although Mahmood has spoken of “live discussions as part of the budget” there appears to be little prospect of a major funding boost to ease a crisis that threatens to boil over.
“It’s shocking that even this, our newest prison is already overcrowded, has insufficient properly qualified staff, and can’t keep all its prisoners occupied and outside their cells for a full day,” says Catherine Heard, director of the World Prison Research Programme at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research . “Five Wells is a resettlement prison, so the focus should be preparing people for their return to society.”
Lock Them Up
England and Wales locks up a bigger proportion of its combined population than anywhere else in Western Europe — apart from Scotland — a total of 88,521 at the last count, according to the Ministry of Justice. And often for longer with the system regularly running at over 99% full. At the end of last week there were just 1,098 places available in England and Wales. And some people are leaving prison with their behavior little changed with reoffending rates among ex-prisoners over the last decade fluctuating between a third and a quarter within the first year after release.
Even before the summer riots Mahmood had announced the plan to release 5,500 prisoners early after serving 40% of their sentences rather than 50% — an idea initially floated by her Conservative predecessor. The process, which began with the 1,700 prisoners on Tuesday, has been described by Charlie Taylor, chief inspector of prisons as providing ”breathing space”. But it risks exposing the underfunded probation service which has to deal with the resettlement of ex-offenders.
“If we had not done this, we faced courts unable to hold trials, police unable to make arrests, and a total breakdown of law and order,” Mahmood told parliament on Tuesday. “It’s impossible to do good quality rehabilitative work in prisons that are over 99% full and locking up prisoners for 23 hours a day, so the first step is to address capacity.”
The prisons crisis is symptomatic of a wider malaise across Britain’s public sector which saw flat growth in real terms spending in the 2010s and a slight uptick in the last parliamentary term. With any increases in government spending focused on protected departments such as health, unprotected budgets felt the brunt of austerity. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the Ministry of Justice — which includes prisons and the probation services — has seen a near 20% cut in day-to-day spending in real terms over the last 15 years. Its budget for 2024-25 is £11 billion, lower than those of the Home Office and Department of Defence.
Labour pledged during the election campaign to reduce reoffending and review sentencing, but it also committed to finishing off a £4 billion prison building program begun by the Conservatives in 2020.
But, elected on a promise to revive Britain’s public services, fiscal constraints mean significant amounts of new funding are unlikely. Reeves’ predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, suggested cuts of between 1.9% and 3.5% per year for day-to-day spending in unprotected departments — including justice — according to the IFS.
Yet the prison crisis is acute. The aging prison estate has suffered from under-investment, but has been kept open to avoid deepening the capacity crisis. “We’ve got entire wings which are not able to be occupied because they’re deemed unsafe,” says Carl Davies, vice president of the Prison Governors’ Association.
Critics argue that some of the money earmarked for new prisons could be better spent. “The billions that the last government and new government have committed to building new prisons won’t touch the sides on the actual population projections,” says Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform. “Some of that money could be used to invest in the existing prisons and in the probation service in the community, in order to get the criminal justice system as a whole functioning better again.”
Does Prison Work?
Timpson, who quit as chair of the Prison Reform Trust to take up his new post, has previously said that a third of inmates should not be in prison and his company has been praised for hiring ex-offenders. This has led some observers to speculate that his appointment could bring a sea change in policy. “He’s somebody who really cares about prisons,” says Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, a public policy think-tank. “He understands the role that businesses can play in helping the resettlement of prisoners on release — to a degree, he can lead by example.”
Yet the experience of Five Wells suggests that modern facilities and a rehabilitative approach might not, on their own, be enough to solve the prisons crisis. In a report earlier this year, the Chief Inspector of Prisons marked Five Wells poorly for its skills and work programs and found that staff were “inexperienced” and unable to challenge bad behavior. Drug use was a “huge problem” with 30% of inmates on average failing mandatory tests and self-harm among prisoners “high” the report found.
G4S has subsequently changed the education provider operating at Five Wells. A prison spokesperson said the facility had “made significant progress” since the initial report in January. Bloomberg requested access to Five Wells and an interview with its director Pete Small but the request was turned down by the Ministry of Justice and G4S.
“You can build all the new prison spaces, which is an important thing, but ultimately, if you don’t have anyone to run these jails and very quickly, we’re going to be in the same problem,” says Alex South, author of Behind These Doors, an account of her time as a prison officer. She says that from 2016-17 “we really started to see the impact of the cuts to the governor’s budget, but also, crucially to staffing.”
Ministry of Justice data show that prison officer levels have improved in the last year, shifting from a 1,180 shortfall to a 224 excess against its targets. But Davies of the Prison Governors’ Association says this masks wider shortages created by the inexperience of new officers and assumptions around time off. A recent survey of prison officers by the Parliamentary Justice Committee found that 84% believed there was not “enough staff to ensure prisoners can engage in purposeful activity.”
Five Wells lays bare the political risk of the prison system. Polling suggests Britons want harsher sentences not more lenient ones. A YouGov survey in July found that 62% of the public believe sentences are not harsh enough, versus just 3% who said they were too punitive.
The length of prison sentences in the UK has been spiraling higher since the 1990s under governments of all stripes. A 1993 speech by Michael Howard, the then Conservative home secretary, declared that “prison works” and is seen as the turning point for policy towards tougher sentencing. No politician — fearing that they will be labelled soft on crime — has dared to challenge the doctrine since. The difference now is that Timpson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is a prisons minister who seems to agree with the minority view that sentencing is too punitive.
“We’re addicted to sentencing. We’re addicted to punishment,” he told Channel 4 News in February. “So many of the people who are in prison, in my view, shouldn’t be there. A lot should, but a lot shouldn’t, and they’re there for far too long, far, far too long. And that’s just getting worse and worse.”
Combined, England and Wales have seen the largest increase in incarceration rates of any Western European country since 1995, according to data from the World Prison Brief at the ICPR: up by 45 to 145 per 100,000 people. The rate has fallen in Portugal, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands over the same period. Several of those countries — the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland — also saw the total number of criminal offences per 100,000 decline between 2016 and 2021, even as England and Wales saw a 25% increase, according to the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics 2024.
“The main factor underlying our stubbornly high imprisonment rates is the steady lengthening of prison terms,” says Heard from the World Prison Research Programme. “It’s due to changes in sentencing laws, like the introduction of ‘three strikes’ laws and mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenses.”
It means that although there are fewer offenders receiving custodial sentences today, those that do are imprisoned for much longer creating bottlenecks in the system. Government data shows that the average prison sentence length was 12.7 months in 2003. Today, it is almost double that at 20.6 months. Longer sentences have led to the prison population doubling in England and Wales since 1993 to over 88,500 with the Ministry of Justice projecting a further increase to as high as 105,000 by late 2027 — a rise the current system could not cope with.
“There is a ratchet effect here,” says Garside, “once sentences have gone up it’s very difficult to reduce them.”
With assistance from Ailbhe Rea and Karolina Sekula.
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