Oral evidence: Work of His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, HC 613

Oral evidence, 20 October 2026.

Witness

Charlie Taylor.

Chair

Welcome to this session of the Justice Committee. We will be taking evidence from Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons. Before we begin questioning, we will ask members of the Committee to briefly make their declarations of interest.

Warinder Juss

Good afternoon, Mr Taylor. I am the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton West. I am a member of the GMB trade union executive council and a member of various APPGs, as well as being an officer. I am also the chair of the APPG on legal and constitutional affairs, which is relevant to today’s meeting.

Janet Daby

Good afternoon, Mr Taylor. I am the Member of Parliament for Lewisham East and I refer you to my declarations of interest.

Mrs Russell

Good afternoon. I am the Member of Parliament for Congleton. I am a solicitor with a current practising certificate. I am a member of the Community and USDAW trade unions and chair of various relevant APPGs. It is all in my declaration.

Chair

I am Chair of the Justice Committee. My interests are as declared on the register of particular relevances—that I am a non-practising barrister and patron of a rehabilitation charity.

Tessa Munt

I am the Member of Parliament for Wells and Mendip Hills in Somerset. Everything is on the register but I will just point out that I am a director and vice-chair of WhistleblowersUK, and I am also the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on penal affairs.

Vikki Slade

I am the Member of Parliament for Mid Dorset and North Poole. I refer you to my register of interests but there is nothing there relevant to this Committee.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

I am the Member of Parliament for Solihull West and Shirley. I refer you to my register of interests but of relevance I am a member of the Bar of England and Wales.

Sir Ashley Fox

Good afternoon. I am the Member for Bridgwater. I am a former solicitor and my interests are on the register.

Chair

Mr Taylor, you are approaching the end of your tenure, which started back in 2020. Do you think the Prison Service is better or worse than when you began?

Charlie Taylor

Thank you very much for inviting me, and many congratulations on your elevation. I obviously will not be around in the future, but the engagement between my organisation and this Committee has been enormously important, so I thank you for your continuing work. You have started off with an incredibly difficult question. When I took over, it was during covid so things were radically different. Prisons were massively locked down. The inspection team was back in prisons by April that year, so we went in very quickly. The Prison Service was fantastic. It was very co-operative because it was keen that we should shine a light into enclosed places in such a difficult time. That issue dominated probably the first 18 months to two years of my tenure. The issue that dominated after that has been the challenge of population pressures, and the prison system was in danger of falling over because there were just too many people coming in and not enough spaces available. On the state of things, some areas have got worse and some have got better. The area that has got worse, in particular, has been the ingress of drugs through drains, which you might want to talk about later on. That poses a serious risk to the stability of some individual prisons and is enormously disruptive. It affects the ability of prisons to fulfil their three responsibilities: punishment, rehabilitation and public protection. The way some organised crime gangs are currently operating in prisons means that none of those three functions are genuinely able to be fulfilled. The purposeful activity results continue to be an area of huge concern. There are too many prisoners locked in their cells for far too long with not enough to do during the day, and that is enormously depressing. In other ways, there have been some excellent developments. The Prison Service is focusing on leadership, and we will see how their new Enable programme works out over time. It is timely because prison governors and people who work in prisons get remarkably little training. It has been very encouraging. Despite the fact that when there is an escape from prison it causes a huge amount of public noise and anxiety, in my tenure of six years as chief inspector, there have only been two escapes from prison. If you go back 20 years or so, that has absolutely transformed, so aspects of security have got a lot better. The overall professionalism and skill of governors is something that has developed, not always because of the Prison Service but sometimes in spite of the system in which they work. We now have some of the best leaders of any public sector service that I have come across in my career. There is a lot to be concerned about but we also have some opportunities for the Prison Service to take things on further in the future.

Chair

As you anticipated, two of the areas we will start with are the most challenging—purposeful activity and drugs and violence. I note that last year you gave evidence to this Committee twice and, as part of your remarks, you said that you felt that time spent productively was good, not just for mental health but for protecting the public, because people who got out were much more likely to get a job. You also said that purposeful activity was one of the healthy prison assessments that consistently scored the lowest and had been consistently scoring the lowest since the inspectorate began in 1982. Since you last gave evidence, has that got better?

Charlie Taylor

Even though there have been some improvements overall in some jails, and that is encouraging, sadly, we are really worried about the future when it comes to purposeful activity. From last October there were big cuts to provision within prisons, and that means in some jails, lots of teaching staff have had to be made redundant and governors have had to try to find a way to consolidate the limited services that they have to get some prisoners the most basic skills. What that has meant in reality is that there are not enough English and maths places for prisoners. Many are desperately in need of remedial basic reading, arithmetic and writing skills so that they will be successful when they come back into the community. Some enrichment activities have also been cut in the last year. Depressingly, I would say that, overall, this is more fragile than it would have been the last time I was in front of this Committee.

Warinder Juss

You mentioned covid and that prisoners are spending far too much time in cells. There are statistics: 34% of men and 50% of women are spending more than 22 hours locked up. What impact does that have on prisoners?

Charlie Taylor

It is really astonishing when you come across prisoners in these circumstances. Some appear to cope remarkably well. They get their heads down and do their time. They are used to sharing a cell in often very squalid and inhumane conditions with another prisoner, an unscreened or barely screened toilet in the corner of the cell, and they are incredibly cramped without enough furniture. Some appear to be able to survive reasonably well there. What worries me most is the long-term, corrosive effect on people’s health. We know that there is a group of prisoners with seriously poor mental health, with diagnosable mental health conditions. On top of that, there are a lot of prisoners who have fragile mental health and are being kept in an environment that is incredibly mentally unhealthy. While we often comment quite positively on the support for people in prison with more acute needs—apart from those who need to transfer to hospital when there is a huge problem—treatment is often reasonably good for the vast wave of prisoners who are mentally unhealthy, but being locked in your cell for long periods of time is unhelpful. On top of that, it feeds boredom. Prisoners have little to do apart from lie on their bed watching daytime television, and in many cases take drugs to pass the time. Tragically, the way in which they are spending their prison sentence is probably not that dissimilar from how they spend much of their time at home: lying on their bed, watching daytime TV and taking drugs. There is a corrosive long-term effect on prisoners’ mental health. The fact is that those prisoners are not being given the support they need to be able to get work and function successfully in society when they come out. The difference between being locked up for 22 hours a day in Pentonville versus walking out on the street is so enormous that many prisoners cannot make that transfer and they are back again within days. It is a huge concern and it worries me enormously that time out of cell has reduced since the pandemic. It has not got back even to the very poor levels it was at before that time.

Warinder Juss

When this Committee prepared its report about ending the cycle of re-offending and rehabilitation, it concluded that purposeful activity was being de-prioritised by the HMPPS and that prisons did not have support for rehabilitation. Do you agree with that?

Charlie Taylor

Yes, absolutely. The report was really important and the timing was excellent. It highlighted some very concerning issues that we continue to flag, and that our colleagues at Ofsted continue to flag on inspection.

Warinder Juss

What do you think needs to change?

Charlie Taylor

There needs to be a re-orientation of prisons towards being places of purpose. That is a difficult task, but as an inspectorate, we score prisons on one to four: one is “poor” and four is “good”. If we give a prison one for safety, people in the Prison Service are really taken aback and they take it really seriously, but I get the impression that if we give another “poor” for purposeful activity, it is a collective shrug: “That is the inspectorate; that is Ofsted. We will never get this stuff sorted.” Understandably, the focus to some extent is on safety and security, but actually, prisons have another job, which is protecting the public. They can protect the public when people are locked up, but they also have a responsibility to protect the public when people come out. If people leave prison having just been locked in their cells for hours a day, and if they are not involved in the kind of purposeful activity that will help them to get work when they come out, I worry that prisons are not fulfilling that particular function. Bear in mind that it is costing the public £57,000-odd a year to keep someone locked up, so there has to be a question for the public about whether they are getting value for money.

Warinder Juss

The Government have said that we should record the amount of time prisoners spend in purposeful activity, and they hope to achieve that by 2027-28. At the same time, you mentioned that there has been a national reduction in core education across prisons. How important do you think the Government’s proposal is, and what do you think the impact of that reduction will be on what the Government are trying to achieve?

Charlie Taylor

It sounds and feels to me that they are pulling in two different directions at the same time. On the one hand, you have an aspiration to improve the standards in purposeful activity but, at the same time, you are cutting provision. That feels counterproductive to me.

Warinder Juss

Your report identified some encouraging signs of progress. You said that some prisons have a strong rehabilitative focus, are supporting prisoners to overcome addiction, and are providing incentives for good behaviour. Can you give us examples of best practice?

Charlie Taylor

Yes. It is a great privilege of this job that I get to see, even in prisons that are often struggling in difficult circumstances, prisons helping to transform the lives of individual prisoners. I will give a couple of examples. We recently inspected HMP Chelmsford, which is a really hard-to-run and very busy local prison in Essex. There are lots of organised crime gang members within the jail, and a difficult and complicated environment. We inspected that jail in 2022 and we gave it an urgent notification because we were so worried about what was going on in that place. We then went back a couple of years later and things had begun to improve. We were there last year and the place has really transformed, in spite of the very high-profile release in error that took place at that prison earlier this year. Under a really strong leader, Mark Howard, the prison has made really amazing progress. What was particularly impressive there was that, despite the fact that they have a big perimeter and it is quite a risky site, they have managed to bear down on the amount of drugs that is coming into the jail by getting lots of different things right. That is an example of a really busy reception prison that can succeed despite many challenges. In my time as chief inspector, probably the best closed prison has been HMP Oakwood, which is just north of your patch at Wolverhampton. There are 2,000 prisoners there. It is currently the biggest jail in the country. Normally, when you walk around a prison, prisoners come and accost us and want to tell us all the things that are going wrong. What is amazing at Oakwood is that you walk around the jail and prisoners come and accost you, but they come and tell you all the things that are going well at that jail. There is a willingness at that prison to pass responsibility down to individual prisoners, provided they earn it and behave well, and the rules are strictly enforced in Oakwood. There are great opportunities for them to be able to take on other activities, work with other prisoners, support other prisoners and make a real difference. May I just flag two open prisons that are outstanding? The first is Haverigg in Cumbria, which is a sex offender prison and has a risky population. It is very close to a local community and village. It has worked enormously hard to build an understanding and rapport with local villagers, who understandably are very nervous about that population being local. It has also worked very hard to develop relationships with employers, which means that when people leave the jail, they can get proper work on release, because obviously, by the nature of their offending, people are often very reluctant to employ former sex offenders. It is a really impressive jail. Finally, HMP Hatfield, just outside Doncaster, is run by a terrific governor called Mick Mills. Again, that prison is all about work, and what he says very interestingly is, “I am not interested in you walking around my prison and seeing lots of hanging baskets and beautifully manicured lawns, because I want my prisoners out in the community actually working.” They get a very high proportion of their prisoners out of the gate every day, going off to work, doing the kind of jobs that they will be able to continue, very often in post, even when they leave the prison. It is building up a sense of continuity and a rehabilitative resource that can transform the lives of some of those men.

Warinder Juss

Can I just ask a quick follow-up question?

Chair

Could I also ask a follow-up question and then I will hand straight back to you, Warinder? When I visited HMP Ranby, I saw some good examples of work that cut the cost of the prison estate—laundry and building furniture—and I saw good examples of work in prisons for the private sector, which in some cases was leading to work after release. Do you think we have the balance right in the types of work being conducted in prisons?

Charlie Taylor

No, not always. There are two things you are trying to do. You are trying to get people into the habit of work, and that means getting up in the morning and ideally spending the whole day at work. Ranby is one of the pilot prisons where the Prison Service is trying to do a proper working day for groups of prisoners. They get up in the morning, go off to work, have their lunch together, and then go back to work in the afternoon. They do not get banged up during the day. What they are doing is living a much more realistic working day. That is really excellent. Sometimes we go to places where prisoners are involved in very mundane activity, which does not really get them anywhere. That is fine if it is a starting point for them developing skills that will help them get employed when they come out, but at times, we see people stuck in some very basic workshops, stripping out LCDs and ripping up pieces of cloth. If there is no progression from that, it feels like it is probably not getting them very far. Prisons such as Ranby, Hatfield and Haverigg can link up with employers on the outside to find suitable types of work for prisoners. It is enormously important. What was interesting is that, despite the travails of the economy at the moment, when I talked to a group of open prison governors recently and said, “Are you able to get employment opportunities for your prison?” they said, “Employers are biting our hands off because they know that these workers will turn up every day, will be reliable and obviously have a lot to lose, so they become particularly good, capable and reliable employees.” There are some real positives, but if the work does not develop at the right pace, it feels like prisoners get ground down by it, and then attendance falls away and progress gets lost.

Chair

If employers are biting their hands off, what are the obstacles in enabling that work to take place?

Charlie Taylor

Open prisons are doing a really good job, by and large, in linking up with local employers. One of the difficulties and challenges, if you are in an open prison and working in an office, a factory or whatever it might be nearby, but your home is a long way away, is to connect you with an organisation closer to home. In some cases, national businesses can do that—so you can work for company X over here and then move elsewhere—but it can be a challenge to find an employer in the person’s local area that is prepared to take them on. Employers who have the courage to do it—obviously, there is a leap of faith to some extent—like having prisoners working for them because they are reliable and hard-working. The other thing is that release on temporary licence used to happen from category C prisons. If you were a well-behaved prisoner, you were able to go and work in the community. That almost never happens, partly because the rules have been tightened so much on it, and partly because governors are much more constrained about who they can let out. You also often see a very fast population churn in category C prisons, so people are only in the prison for a matter of weeks. Obviously, you would not be able to risk-assess whether someone was capable of being released on temporary licence in those circumstances. Those are some headwinds that militate against being able to get prisoners into work.

Warinder Juss

At the beginning of your answer, you mentioned that HMP Chelmsford has been able to reduce drug use. What has it done differently to reduce the use of drugs in its prison that other prisons fail to do?

Charlie Taylor

This is interesting. What it has done is get the basics right, really, and there are a number of things. First, it is about assertively managing prisoners who come in who they know are at risk of being able to move drugs around. It is about making sure that those prisoners are moving cells regularly, if they are beginning to build up connections on a particular wing, putting them into wings where they can be more closely supervised or in cells where it is much more difficult to get deliveries from drones. It is about keeping track of individual prisoners. Secondly, it is about making sure that some of the basic officer craft is done well: searching the grounds really well, making sure that cell searches take place, that prisoners are properly body scanned when they come into the jail and that visitors get searched, and following up on any concerns over staff corruption. There is no magic bullet and it still does not fundamentally solve the problem of drones, which continues to dog prisons. When we inspected Chelmsford, the mandatory testing rate for drugs showed that about 15% of prisoners were testing positive for drugs. That is not great by any standards but, when you compare it with other prisons—I was in Forest Bank last week, where their rate of testing showed over 30% of prisoners testing positive—there is something about what Chelmsford has done in just getting the basics right that has been able to bear down on that overall number. However, 15% is still too high.

Tessa Munt

The Committee did a report on tackling the drugs crisis in our prisons last October, and it said, “Without urgent reform addressing the underlying crisis of demand for drugs…the prison estate remains unstable, unsafe and incapable of delivering” any of its rehabilitation objectives. How effective are the current measures at tackling drugs in prisons? What would you like to see the Government do on this?

Charlie Taylor

There are two things here; one is about supply and one is about demand. Both are big and complicated issues. When it comes to reducing supply, it is about the Prison Service working with other organisations. We have been very slow in our response to the threat of drones. I do not think there has been proper collaboration between the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Prison Service, the police, the National Crime Agency, security services and the Ministry of Defence to really think about this. The criminals have been winning the race, not least because they do not have to go through Government procurement exercises to get more kit, which is obviously to their advantage. They have been winning the race and the response has been too slow and piecemeal. Partly, technological solutions will help with this—for example, bearing down on the number of mobile phones that find their way into prisons. However, if you get into a technological arms race with organised crime, there is quite a big chance that you might end up spending a lot of money and actually losing. It is partly that and it is partly about target hardening—making sure that windows are secure and netting is in place in yards. It is about making sure that CCTV works around the prison so that you can keep an eye on what is going on. Some prisons have automatic number plate recognition systems connected with local police services, which also makes a very big difference. My response to Mr Juss was about getting the basics right when it comes to jailcraft—you combine all those things together and then, on top of that, think about the really big players in prison. They are people who come into prison—their feet barely touch the ground and they are running a big organised crime operation within the jail. Thinking about how you manage those people so that they cannot just carry on with impunity, running not only a new market in a prison but continuing to run their drugs operation on the outside as well, is sadly all too common.

Tessa Munt

We had a discussion, maybe not with you but certainly with others, about the business of segregating those who are serious crime organisers or bosses and putting them into separate wings, or whatever. Can you give your views on that?

Charlie Taylor

There is a strong case for trying something here because there are some very big players who have the means and the wherewithal to move large amounts of product and cash around the place; they understand the way these complicated systems operate. Actually, being able to make life more difficult for them while they are in prison will make a big difference because, at the moment, prison is not a particular deterrent for them. They can carry on running a successful business. I was also going to briefly mention reductions in supply. Referring back to Mr Juss’s questions, reducing supply by having prisoners doing something that feels productive, like they are making progress but also having proper drug treatments in place within prisons, is something that is not always a huge priority. There are some brilliant examples. I was in HMP Bristol a couple of weeks ago. It is a really hard-to-run prison with all kinds of challenges. We gave it an urgent notification three years ago because we were so worried about the place. Under a fantastic leader, Amanda Corrigan, that prison has been transformed and is now going in the right direction. That jail has an incentivised substance-free living wing and addicted prisoners are selected to come on to it. It has a really strong recovery offer for those men, which is really making a difference. I talked to a number of prisoners on that wing who said, “This has saved my life but it is also going to transform my life as well.” There are examples of these ISFLs, which are really good. Sadly, we go to other prisons where there are really good places to buy drugs. Sometimes, they are full of organised crime gang members who have got themselves on to this wing to stay away from the chaos they created elsewhere in the jail. Sometimes, they are full of normal, reasonably well-behaved prisoners who are not involved in any drug recovery programmes. It is interesting. In all the talk about population and population pressures recently, there has not been much discussion about how we bear down on the people who keep coming back to prison. One of the biggest groups of prisoners who go through the revolving door is prisoners with addiction, either to drugs or alcohol. Until we are able to deal with that problem, until prisoners are able to take that seriously—as we have seen at HMP Bristol, HMP The Mount, HMP Cardiff and at HMP Aylesbury, where some really good work is going on—and until we can really take on that drug addiction, the danger is that prisons become a respite from life out on the streets for some people.

Tessa Munt

We had evidence from various individuals who said, “Oh well, under current legislation we cannot move those people who are the problem into separate wings or separate prisons.” Do you sense that there is a problem with the current legislation?

Charlie Taylor

We currently have a separation regime for the most risky prisoners who have committed murders in prison; they live in what are called close supervision centres. We also have a provision in place for prisoners who are radicalisers on the wing—so prisoners who may not do anything physically risky themselves but are dangerous radicalisers on the wing. So there are separation centres. If we are able to run those types of deep custody, and there are risks with holding people in those sorts of conditions in those circumstances, I am not entirely sure why it would not be possible to think about that with people who are enormously disruptive within prisons in a different way.

Tessa Munt

Perhaps I can move on to the next questions, which are about violence.

Chair

Before you do, can I ask one more question about drugs? You talked about some really positive examples where drug treatment has been effective in prisons. Do you feel that when they are released, there is ongoing adequate support to maintain that recovery and avert them coming straight back through that revolving door?

Charlie Taylor

There is a real challenge there and some places do it better than others. Often, it is a third sector organisation that will pick people up as they come out of the gate. Many prisoners, if they have served a sentence, walk out of the gate and have the 80 quid discharge grant in their pocket. Sadly, there may be dealers waiting outside the jail for prisoners because they know they will have some money and want to take drugs. Helping people in that critical bit when they come through the gate is really important. The other feeder of risk is homelessness. People go out street homeless from prison—there are 20% to 25% in some cases; Wormwood Scrubs was around that number. We were in Forest Bank up in Manchester last week and again it was around that number. If people are going out street homeless, then it is very hard for them to be able to do the stuff they need to do to stay away from drugs. Of course, they are then a target for drug dealers themselves.

Chair

It feels like a lot of the levers that need to be pulled to maintain staying on the straight and narrow are ones that are not necessarily focused on justice. They are housing and health, which make that a difficult—

Charlie Taylor

That is absolutely true. To give one more example, there is a drug called Buvidal. It is for opiate addicts and is a monthly injection, rather than them needing to take methadone every day. Methadone has a psychoactive effect, so it makes you high while Buvidal does not. Buvidal is a really good drug for long-term opium addicts who have struggled to get off the drug. Unfortunately, we find that some prisons, for whatever reason, are unable to prescribe it, but when prisoners go back out into the local community, some local authority areas do not provide Buvidal for patients despite the fact that it is an enormous money-saver because of the social cost of a drug addict stealing. I was talking to a guy the other day who said he was spending 500 quid a day on drugs. That guy is committing an awful lot of crime. If he was on Buvidal, it would be 3,500 quid a week that is not being stolen from somewhere or someone. That lack of connectedness is a big source of frustration for us.

Warinder Juss

I would have thought that we need particular prison spaces to deal with drug treatment, rehabilitation and purposeful activities. The Government have announced that, in order to create more prison spaces, they want to convert certain parts of prison spaces, such as laundry rooms, into cells. Do you think there is a danger in doing that? Would that have an effect in reducing the spaces that we need for rehabilitation? Do you think that measure is necessary to create more prison spaces?

Charlie Taylor

I am not sure the magic bullet that will solve our population crisis is squeezing a few more cells on wings out of laundries and things like that. There is an opportunity cost, because if prisoners cannot wash their clothes, that is also a source of disgruntlement. Here and there, there are bits of the estate out of which they may be able to squeeze more spaces. Overall, that will not solve the fundamental prison population crisis, which will probably blow up again sometime next year at some level and will then become much more serious in 2028 under the current projections.

Tessa Munt

Moving to violence and the safety of prisoners, your inspectorate’s annual report found that violence had increased in two-thirds of the men’s prisons that you inspected last year, and serious assaults had risen in 40% of the prisons they inspected. You have touched on this already, but what measures do you feel would be most critical in reducing the level of violence and improving the level of safety in prisons?

Charlie Taylor

Drugs, critically, because drugs equal debt, and debts get paid by violence, in effect. The debt either gets paid by the prisoner or, very often, by their family out in the community. We have no idea of the scale of that problem, but it is pretty terrifying, so drugs are a critical part of that. This is also about having properly recruited and trained staff who have tuned-in radars and understand what a risky situation begins to look or feel like, who can work with individual prisoners to make sure that they are looked after and that their risk is being reduced. It is also about having specialist units in place for riskier prisoners. That does not always have to be particularly sophisticated. If you go somewhere such as Pentonville, there is a wing for neurodiverse prisoners—particularly those on the autistic spectrum who really struggle with life in prison. They bounce in and out of the segregation unit. Their behaviour can be enormously challenging for other prisoners and staff. We talked to men there who said, “I would have been causing trouble all the time but I’m settled here—I’m able to get on with my time and be successful.” By training some staff, creating a discrete unit, and bearing down on the level of drugs where prisoners are involved in purposeful activity and where you are specialising with some riskier prisoners, there is the possibility of progress. Good prisons can do that.

Tessa Munt

I accept that for those who are on the autistic spectrum or who have ADHD, and various other conditions. Your prisoner survey said that 25% of the overall respondents said they felt unsafe, but it was up to 75% when you went to Swaleside and Wakefield. What is going on in those two prisons that makes them stand out or leap 50%?

Charlie Taylor

They were risky places but for different reasons. Swaleside is a prison that was in real crisis when we inspected it. We gave it our lowest scores in healthy prison assessments for safety, respect, purposeful activity and preparation for release. Staff were backing off prisoners because of the level of anxiety they felt. There was a palpable tension walking around the jail; the hairs on the back of your neck were going up as you walked around. You were always checking that you were near a wall. It was producing a visceral reaction, and that was just an inspection team who were there for a week. For staff living there, you can imagine the corrosive effect of being in an environment that was so frightening. We saw astonishingly high levels of violence in that place; people walking on to the wing and being stabbed within seconds of arriving because the prison was not able to filter out prisoners from different gangs who were meeting each other very quickly. Almost everything that could go wrong in a prison was going wrong at Swaleside. At Wakefield, things were slightly different. It is an unusual prison. It is a category A prison, so it holds very serious offenders, and has a mixed population of those responsible for serious sex offences committed against children and other prisoners. There had been a high-profile murder and then a second very high-profile murder at that prison. Therefore, prisoners who were in that category who had committed offences against children were very nervous about the environment they were finding themselves in. When we went back to do a review of progress at Wakefield, they had thought hard about how they managed their population and had put the most vulnerable prisoners—those who were most at risk—on a separate unit. Things felt calmer and there was a greater level of confidence than there had been in the past. We have not been back to Swaleside, so we have to wait and see how things are progressing there.

Vikki Slade

I have a couple of brief questions on this, and then some other questions. The first is on people with mental illnesses. I have a couple of constituents who have ended up in prison, and their families say that prison is absolutely inappropriate and their needs should be met in a hospital. How confident are you that our prisons have the ability to manage mental health illnesses—not mental issues—so people who are schizophrenic or have serious mental illnesses are managed alongside people who are allegedly mentally well? Where is your confidence level on that, and what needs to change to make that a safe situation?

Charlie Taylor

Confidence level at the inspectorate is low on that. We put a report out about 18 months ago looking at mental health transfers—so transfers from prison into hospital of people who palpably could not be in prison, because prisons cannot treat people under the Mental Health Act as they cannot force people in a prison to take medication. If you have a schizophrenic prisoner who is a huge risk to themselves and to the staff around them, apart from locking them in the segregation unit, there is very little that those prisons can do for those men. They make a referral through mental health processes. There is a shortage of beds. We described in our report a labyrinthine game of snakes and ladders where you apply for a particular provision, you get knocked back and have to start from scratch again and then try to find somewhere for the prisoner to be placed. These are difficult prisoners to place because they are challenging. One of the worst we came across was at Swaleside, where it took more than 700 days. The standard set for a transfer from prison to hospital, when it comes to severe mental health problems, is supposed to be 28 days, and we came across a case that had been in Swaleside for over 700 days waiting for that transfer. If I remember our report rightly, it was taking on average about 80 days to get people transferred. We were in Bristol two weeks ago, and it was a pretty seamless process for whatever reason. It seemed to work reasonably well there, probably because of the number of beds and the way the prison was working with the local authority. Any sense that prison is a good place to put mentally ill people, any sense that you are actually protecting the public in the longer term by sticking really unwell people in prison, is simply fanciful. It puts staff in an enormously difficult position because they are not mental health practitioners. They should not be mental health practitioners. If prisoners will not engage with their treatment, there is really nothing that they can do. I was in Forest Bank in Manchester last week, where there were some incredibly unwell men living in the segregation unit in totally inappropriate conditions. This is normally where you put the bad guys, but there was nowhere else they could reasonably keep those people. It simply was not an appropriate place to keep someone who was in a complete mental health meltdown, not even a crisis.

Vikki Slade

One of my two constituents died in prison a couple of months ago and their family was adamant that this young woman should have been in a hospital. The prison was saying, “No, no, we can manage, we can manage.” What do you do when you have these mental illnesses that become a very serious case of self-harm or suicide? How does the inspectorate use those lessons? Are they consistent in changing how people with mental illnesses are managed?

Charlie Taylor

This is something we often flag in our reports. In a high proportion of our reports, we flag the amount of time it is taking for mental health transfers to happen in the jail. If you are a prisoner on a treatment programme, and you are taking your medication and engaging, you can be cared for within the jail. If you are not, that is a big concern. What we have seen recently, particularly in the west midlands, is a new scheme called the red route, run by West Midlands police. They were failing to triage prisoners within the police station properly, as to whether they should be assessed as needing to go to hospital rather than prison. What was happening, and what we found in HMP Birmingham, was prisoners who were extremely unwell arriving in the jail, and there was no room for them in the segregation unit. They had a guy who was walking around the wing naked, other guys who were smearing all over the walls of their cells, and the prison really struggled to cope. We have written publicly to a number of Ministers from Health, the Home Office, the chief constable and to the police and crime commissioner there to flag this issue in Birmingham, in the west midlands. Sadly, it is likely that it may have led to a death in HMP Foston Hall as well, though we do not yet know the details of that particular case. If that becomes a more generalised police practice, we will have an even bigger problem on our hands.

Mrs Russell

In terms of mental health in the women’s estate, I have been looking at a prevention of future deaths report about Styal Prison, which is not a million miles away from me. The report said that half of all deaths in the women’s estate are occurring in Styal. Do you have a view on whether the problems are the same in the women’s estate as the men’s estate? What has gone wrong at Styal specifically? There was a report from an unannounced inspection at the end of 2024. Has the service been back since, or when are they due to go back?

Charlie Taylor

We have not been back since, but we will. Styal is a risky prison. It is holding some very challenging women, so it is always one of those prisons we will go back to at some stage. Obviously, it would be an unannounced inspection. We will turn up when we turn up. Prisons such as Styal, Bronzefield, Eastwood Park and Foston Hall, which are taking women off the streets, are incredibly risky. The difference between men’s and women’s prisons is really just the level of need. The vulnerability level of women is often extreme. Incredibly unwell women who are often living homeless with all the vulnerabilities that will bring, who have often been exploited by men, and who have serious mental health problems or personality disorders, are really struggling, often with addiction issues as well. In some cases, it is almost a more extreme version of what we see in male prisons, and the risk to those women is even higher out in the community than we find for men.

Vikki Slade

That brings me beautifully on to women in prison. Earlier this year, some of us went to visit Bronzefield. One thing I recall from that was the comment that 90% of the women who were there were victims of crime, which had then led them to being perpetrators. What lessons have you learned about when custody is most or least appropriate, and how can those lessons inform a move to have fewer women in prison?

Charlie Taylor

One has to be a bit careful here, because a huge number of men who end up in prison are also victims of crime. One has to caution a little against the idea that all women who end up in prison could probably be somewhere else. When you look at the offences they have committed, they are probably in the right place. Even if they had not been convicted of a violent crime, I am not sure the public would tolerate people who have been involved in the importation of very large quantities of category A drugs or defrauding old ladies of their life savings necessarily needing to avoid prison. Nevertheless, in women’s prisons, there is a greater proportion of women serving shorter custodial sentences. There is a real question about what good the prison is actually doing for those women. The work Edwina Grosvenor has done with the centre for women in Sussex is the kind of thing that could be replicated to keep women out of prison, and to help them to rebuild their lives without going through the trauma and challenge of being locked up with a group of people, some of whom are very risky and potentially violent. Women’s prisons are different, and the women who end up in prison are different. There is a different population in there. I am in no doubt that some could be better managed in the community. It is very often that group—we talk about it with men as well—of those who are drug-addicted, mentally ill and living homeless, and have the revolving door of criminality, that come in and out of prison. One of the most eye-opening things to happen to me as chief inspector was when I was at HMP Styal. I was in the property room where people collect their property before they go out. There was a woman there and the officer said, “Do you want your stuff?” She said, “No, just leave it. I’ll be back soon.” For lots of these women, prison was the most stable thing in their life. Going back into Styal, Eastwood Park or Bronzefield was actually an area of stability that they just did not have anywhere else. That is a pretty depressing place to find your stability, quite honestly.

Vikki Slade

The Government have an aim to reduce the women’s population by 400, and I think what you were talking about is interesting. You are right: there are people in there you would not want on the streets. We witnessed these very short sentences. Do you think that it is right to be looking at reducing that population, or do you think that is the wrong focus? Is there counter-intuitiveness in asking if a longer sentence is something that we should be aiming for with the purpose of rehabilitation and public protection, as opposed to the punishment side? If they are coming back anyway, put the two together and do some more good.

Charlie Taylor

This is a really interesting question. As chief inspector of prisons, I have to be cautious about commenting on areas outside my remit, such as sentencing. Ultimately, that is a decision for the courts and Ministers to work on with judges to set the sentencing framework. If it is possible that you could manage someone’s risk in the community and the public can be reassured that someone’s risk is being managed in the community, and they can get the treatment they need to not commit further offences and not make people’s lives a misery out in the community, then certainly, wherever possible, we would encourage that. I have to be careful not to go beyond my remit on that.

Tessa Munt

Do you have a view on community payback schemes?

Charlie Taylor

I have seen some brilliant stuff. When I was at the Youth Justice Board, I saw some fantastic stuff going on. I cannot remember the name of the organisation doing brilliant work, with guys coming out of prison and on probation. As chief inspector, it is probably just beyond our remit.

Vikki Slade

That moves me on to children in custody. You said at the beginning of your presentation that it has been a struggle to get people teaching English and maths—presumably that was in the adult prisons. We know that children in prison have a statutory right to a minimum of 15 hours a week. According to your 2025-26 report, 16% said that they were not participating in any educational work. We saw that again when we visited a young offenders institute. What are the reasons behind that and how do you think they can be addressed?

Charlie Taylor

Bear in mind that it used to be 27 hours a week that they were supposed to get to, so it was reduced—

Vikki Slade

Fifteen hours is outrageous when they have nothing else to do.

Charlie Taylor

Exactly. It was reduced from 27. There is an outlier here: HMP Parc, a small YOI inside a big prison in south Wales. I will come on to that. In the three public-sector run young offenders institutions—Wetherby, Warrington and Feltham—one of the biggest problems is how long people are stuck behind their doors. These are energetic young men, by and large, who are locked behind their doors for 18 to 19 hours a day. They are lucky if they get out for more than six hours a day in many cases, and some are locked up for long periods of time. They also have these incredibly complicated keep-apart lists: A cannot be with B, who cannot be with C, who cannot be with D. There are some circumstances where that makes sense. If someone has committed a serious offence against the relative of someone else in the jail, it makes sense to keep them apart as they are probably not going to be able to resolve their difficulties. We find, in lots of cases, that it is because they have had a row in the van on the way in or something like that, or they fell out with each other somewhere in the jail. There has actually been a reduction in some keep-apart lists, which is good because it means that, if you have three boys you cannot mix on a wing, you can only unlock each boy for a relatively short period of time per day. First, this is about bearing down on the amount of keep-apart lists. Secondly, it is about having proper behaviour management in place. What are the incentives for the people who behave well in this establishment? When we inspected Feltham in 2023, it was doing this stuff really well. There were real incentives for behaving. What are the consequences if you misbehave? We find that, with some prison officers, we see boys in places such as Feltham really pushing the boundaries and being able to get away with stuff. If there is a sense that the rules do not apply, of course people are going to break them. It is about having incentives for people to do the right thing, but also following up when people do the wrong thing and making sure that there are consequences for that. It is about having decent education provision, and strong, first-class teaching. Sadly, what we see in so many of the places we inspect is that children are allocated to classes not because they have the same interests and abilities as their peers, but because they are not going to hit the people in there, as they have a reasonably good relationship with them. That is no way to be running things. The outlier is HMP Parc, where the boys are out for around 10 to 11 hours a day. The attendance at education is excellent. The standards of teaching are far better. Our colleagues at Estyn gave it a very high rating when it visited the jail. There is a very capable staff team within it that understands the boys and their care and sets very clear boundaries for them. There are opportunities for boys to do activities that will help to enrich them—inevitably, rugby and other sports. Overall, that makes it a more capable and competently run establishment.

Vikki Slade

Why is it doing it well? Why is that not reflected in the other three?

Charlie Taylor

We ask that question a lot. It is a pretty grim unit, I have to say. It is not brand new and wonderful. It was an old segregation or high-security unit that was converted into a YOI. They have made the best of what they have, but it is not particularly about the environment. It is about having a clear ethos, clear rules, great incentives if you do the right thing, and clear consequences if you do the wrong thing. It is about having a highly capable staff team and a very strong leadership team who drive forward improvement. It is about the momentum that they can get. You walk into that prison and instead of walking into chaos, anxiety, and fear, you walk into somewhere you think you might be able to cope. It is worth saying that Parc used to be a south Wales jail for south Wales people. It is now a national resource. People come from all over the country. We often see people who have really struggled in Feltham, Warrington or Wetherby go to Parc and be far more successful in getting their head down and being able to get on with their sentence. It is a really excellent establishment. At our last inspection, we gave it four fours across the board, which is unusual.

Vikki Slade

Is there any evidence that re-offending is lower following time spent in Parc?

Charlie Taylor

I wouldn’t know. There are a couple of problems with re-offending rates. First, you are only measuring those who get caught. People who come out and do not get caught obviously do not feature in the re-offending rate, so it is hard to measure. If people have completed their sentence, you have no way of being able to keep tabs on them. If they come out and they are on licence, obviously, probation services will be keeping tabs on them. When I started this job, I thought it should have been much easier to track re-offending rates. Actually, with individual people, it is not always as easy as I hoped it was going to be.

Vikki Slade

Is there not a single record that follows somebody through their life?

Charlie Taylor

You can pick up the re-offending rates of some individuals, but it does not necessarily give you an overall picture of the effectiveness of the rehabilitation. To some extent, there is a leap of faith here. We say that if you put someone in a safe and decent environment, you give them a decent education, you have staff who look after and care for them, and they are not involved in violence, one has to assume that when they go out, the options will probably be better for them.

Vikki Slade

The Committee has been undertaking an inquiry on children and young adults in the secure estate. Ahead of the Government’s youth custody transformation plan in the coming months, where would you suggest the Committee focuses its attention before we finish that work?

Charlie Taylor

You need to look at why Parc is successful and what Parc is able to do. If all the provision was as good as Parc, we would not be having this conversation. We would be congratulating ourselves on the fact that we have a youth justice system to be proud of when it comes to custody.

Vikki Slade

Do you have a view on secure children’s homes?

Charlie Taylor

I have a view because it was my idea in the first place, from my review of the youth justice system in 2015. I would like there to be more of them. The original plan was that there would be more of them. This is personal—I am not speaking as chief inspector now. They would then have been able to learn from one another and grow as a type of institution. We do not inspect Oasis Restore so I do not have a view on the current state of play; Ofsted does that.

Chair

This is a good moment to bring in Janet.

Janet Daby

I just want to get a view on Oasis Restore. I do not know how much you can say on that because it is Ofsted. I hear that it is not meeting its expectations, and I just want to get a sense of how well it is or is not doing, in terms of what it was first set up to do.

Charlie Taylor

It is very difficult to say, from our point of view. The credibility—both my credibility and the credibility of my organisation—comes from what we say when we are on inspection, what we see when we are rigorously digging under the skin of an institution. We do not inspect Oasis; that is Ofsted’s responsibility. It would therefore be unfair of me to express a view on that. I have visited, but I have not been there since it reopened eight months ago, of whenever it was.

Janet Daby

I hear you clearly but perhaps I can press you on this. In terms of young people being referred from the YOIs or being transferred to Oasis Restore, are you seeing much of that happening or taking place?

Charlie Taylor

Currently, the numbers in Oasis Restore are fairly low, but I do not know exactly what they are at the moment. I could not say.

Janet Daby

PAVA spray is currently being used in YOIs and adult prisons. What do you feel prisons need to do in order not to rely on the use of PAVA spray? What needs to happen in the prisons?

Charlie Taylor

That is a really good question and it is important, particularly in the context of the youth estate. To some extent, I would not have started here if our youth estate had clear boundaries, very well-trained staff and a vision for how they can operate. We see this in HMP Parc, where I do not know if they even have PAVA, and if they have, I am sure they have not deployed it. That shows that these children are not beyond the scope of being able to be managed in a traditional, almost more of a school-like way. When you watch the footage of PAVA being used and you see the situations that develop, from a pragmatic point of view, it is hard not to think that it could have saved someone from serious injury. What I would like to see is prisons not being in the state where they even have to rely on PAVA to solve problems in the first place. Elsewhere within the adult estate, use of PAVA tends to be very high in the young adult part. Again, you look at CCTV or body-worn camera footage and sometimes you think, actually, that officer has probably saved a whole lot of serious harm to people by intervening. However, we come across other uses where we are really worried about the way it gets used. There is disproportionality here; we know that it gets used more on young black men than on other groups. Again, that is something that the Prison Service needs to look at and really understand why that is happening.

Janet Daby

From what I understand you are saying, HMP Parc is functioning very well. In your view, why has the learning from how well Parc has functioned not been transferred to Feltham or Werrington?

Charlie Taylor

It is difficult because there is a stability about the staffing and leadership at Parc that really helps; we have seen a higher turnover of leadership in other establishments. They are also bigger and that poses a challenge. There are around 35 to 40 boys currently at Parc, and there are only 70 or 80 at Feltham at the moment. It is not hugely bigger, and not like the days when more than 200 boys were in individual establishments. There is something about the culture, the ethos, the high-quality behaviour management and the skills of staff there that makes a big difference. There is also genuinely purposeful activity that makes kids think it is really worth turning up because they are learning something that is going to make a difference to them. To the credit of the Prison Service, it has seconded a brilliant prison officer from HMP Parc to assist with enrichment activity to help engage boys elsewhere in the estate. I have not spoken to him for a bit, but he was doing outstanding work when he was at Parc.

Chair

Before we move on from children and young people, there was huge public concern in response to the Fordingbridge rape case. Do you feel that there are effective interventions available in custody, or in the community, to address that kind of sexual offending by children?

Charlie Taylor

When we inspect, we regularly see children locked up for very long periods of time, often fearful of the offence being known by their peers. We rarely see any effective treatment or support for children convicted of serious sexual offences. When it comes to that individual case, obviously there were huge concerns raised publicly, but in terms of the inspectorate, again, that would be beyond the scope of our remit.

Chair

The question was more widely about whether you are aware of there being effective interventions, because there is real concern about what availability there is to deal with that.

Charlie Taylor

It is difficult because the Prison Service offers various programmes, but the efficacy of treatment programmes for sex offenders has been challenged over the years, in terms of whether they actually make a difference. I would say that actually, overall, the re-offending rate for sex offenders—notwithstanding that there are some serious, dangerous and persistent criminals in this area—tends to be lower than it is for other sorts of offences.

Mrs Russell

Do we have any reliable statistics on whether that is the case for very young child sexual offenders?

Charlie Taylor

I do not think we have, but we can certainly check. The trouble is that they are so rare and so few that it is probably hard to get any kind of concrete, meaningful data on those cases. Understanding what works for a handful of individuals probably does not give you an overview of what the right thing to do is when the next one comes in.

Tessa Munt

You were talking about sexual offenders re-offending. Can I check whether somebody has cross-checked the data for those who do not re-offend and whether there is a relationship—for want of a better word—between those who do not offend again and those whose offences might have been family offences, such as incest or a close family member, for which they have been caught? Do we have an idea of that?

Charlie Taylor

To be honest, I do not know. We can certainly pick up and look into that.

Tessa Munt

Could you write to the Chair about that? Thank you.

Charlie Taylor

Certainly. If we can find the data, we will share the source with you, but I do not know if that data is available—sorry.

Sir Ashley Fox

I would like to talk to you about the early release of prisoners. You stated that even after the early release of prisoners on the 1 and 13 October, the prison population will remain extremely high, and the ongoing problems of overcrowding will remain. What is your assessment of the effectiveness of the Government’s early release scheme on easing pressure on prison capacity?

Charlie Taylor

There are a number of things here. The first thing is that they had to do something. With the number of prisoners coming in and the number of places available, the bath was going to overflow and they either had to turn the taps off—stop sending people to custody who had been sentenced by the court, which was not going to be possible—or they were going to have to find a way to let people out early. Otherwise, prisons were just going to become overcrowded to the extent that we were going to see a real risk to stability inside. During my tenure, the inspectorate has, for many years, focused on prisons’ failure to do proper rehabilitative work that is going to make people less likely to re-offend when they come out. I have talked about purposeful activity, drugs and the management of cases leaving custody—the way in which the handover takes place between the prison offender manager, the person who is managing their case within prison, and the community offender manager and probation services out in the community. In our reports over the years, we frequently commented on how that does not work. If you are adding a large number to the normal 1,000 prisoners a week coming out of prisons, of course it is going to stretch both the Prison Service and services out in the community, and therefore that adds to the risk to the public.

Sir Ashley Fox

If it was not working very well before the early release of prisoners, it is reasonable to assume that it is working even less well if they are having to cope with even more prisoners in a sort of flood.

Charlie Taylor

Certainly, my colleague Martin Jones at the inspectorate of probation has, throughout the last couple of months, been flagging up his concerns about how these prisoners will be cared for in the community—making sure that if they are due to be tagged, they get tagged in a timely fashion, that they are being genuinely monitored when they are out in the community and, where appropriate, they are pulled back into custody. Inevitably, an area that was already a big concern for us that then has an increase in the amount of prisoners going through gives us a worry. Also, there is an opportunity cost for prisons, because if prison staff are focusing in on just doing releases, there is other stuff in the jail that they are not able to do with their time.

Sir Ashley Fox

The result for prisoners that are released early, without any sort of care relating to how they are released into the community, is presumably more re-offending and them being recalled back to prison, so actually, nothing has been achieved in their cases.

Charlie Taylor

Yes, certainly. We have been doing a thematic report with our colleagues in probation, where we have been looking at drug treatment in prison and what happens to people when they come back out into the community. Depressingly, as part of the process of the thematic report, we will be talking to people who have come back into custody very quickly. When we talk to prisoners on inspection, we often find that the team will talk to someone on the Monday who says, “I’m getting out today, but don’t worry, you’ll see me again by the end of the week because I’m going out homeless. I won’t make my appointments for probation and I’ll get picked up by the police and thrown back into custody.” Adrian Usher, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, told me that their estimate was that it takes probably two days of police time to recall someone to custody. It is not just about the strain that is put on probation services and the Prison Service; it is also on other local services in the community.

Sir Ashley Fox

Releasing people like that early is entirely counterproductive because they are then processed by the police and back they go.

Charlie Taylor

The risk is that if you just have that revolving door and you cannot do the stuff to make people less likely to re-offend, that risk is simply increased. We have commented on this area throughout my tenure as chief inspector. The more people who are going out and the more strain there is on local services, the riskier it becomes.

Sir Ashley Fox

I will move on to tagging prisoners. There is now a presumption to tag offenders on release, and the Government have been piloting a scheme to tag prisoners before they leave prison. We have heard that there are issues on parts of the prison estate, and the contract has been preventing offenders from being tagged at source. What are the barriers to tagging prisoners on release, and how can they be mitigated?

Charlie Taylor

We have not yet inspected a jail where this is happening, so I would not be able to comment on the challenges at this stage.

Sir Ashley Fox

Do you think it is feasible for prison staff to tag prisoners, either as they leave prison or immediately outside, perhaps in a sort of departure lounge or other arrangement?

Charlie Taylor

You have a captive audience, so one would think that this might be possible to do. Having not seen this in action and not seen the pilots, I am not sure what the barriers to being able to do that successfully might be.

Sir Ashley Fox

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said that there have been over 100 tag breaches a day since this scheme started. Is tagging realistically a suitable alternative to custody if it is being so haphazardly applied and ignored even when it is in place?

Charlie Taylor

One of the things is that if prisoners go out homeless, they are not being tagged—that is a category of prisoner who will not be supervised in that way. Again, this is to some extent anecdotal, because it is too early to say what the outcome will be, and to some extent, it is outside my remit. When you talk to prisoners, some actually quite like having a tag on the outside because it gives them something they can point to when their associates try to pull them into nefarious-type activity. There are also some ex-prisoners who are so chaotic that you cannot help thinking that they may struggle to cope with the strictures of being able to wear a tag and the discipline that it imposes. We need to wait and see how effective this policy change has been once the data is in.

Sir Ashley Fox

Do you think it is feasible for the Government to roll out this scheme to the whole estate from January, as planned?

Charlie Taylor

We will wait and see. Again, that is an area for our colleagues in the inspectorate of probation rather than for us at the inspectorate of prisons. In effect, our remit ends at the prison gate.

Mrs Russell

Not entirely dissimilarly to tagging, the Government have talked about removing foreign national offenders directly from prisons and they now have powers to do that at any point within a sentence. Do you know if that is happening effectively?

Charlie Taylor

Certainly, the work between the Home Office and particularly the three foreign national prisons—Maidstone, Huntercombe and Moorland—has got better. The process is now more streamlined than it used to be. We used to find loads of prisoners in jails, such as Wandsworth, sitting around on what was called an IS-91. They were past their release date and were, in effect, in Home Office detention while being retained in prison. That is not ideal at all. Actually, partly because of the prison population crisis, expediency has meant they have had to speed up that process, so it is more streamlined than it used to be. Nevertheless, when we inspect immigration removal centres, we still see difficulties with deportation. Only around 50% of the detainees actually end up getting deported. Ultimately, most are released back into the community.

Chair

We will move on to the 10-year prison capacity strategy.

Mrs Russell

The Government are aiming to deliver 14,000 new prison places by 2031. How confident are you that they will achieve that aim?

Charlie Taylor

It is one thing building the prisons and having the extra cell blocks available; making sure that they are staffed properly is another thing entirely. We were looking at the plans earlier. One is for a prison to be built in Buckinghamshire. There are four prisons in Buckinghamshire: HMP Bullingdon, Grendon, Spring Hill and Aylesbury. Bullingdon has for many years been a black site for recruitment, so they have had to try all kinds of ways of recruiting and retaining staff—not helped by the difficulties with vetting, but that is another issue at the moment. Those prisons struggle to recruit enough staff. A 1,400 place prison is due to be opened next door to HMP Grendon. I just do not see how they will be able to staff it, particularly as just up the road in Kidlington, an immigration removal centre, Campsfield, has also just opened, where the staff starting salary will probably be higher than it would be within prisons. You can build the prisons, but if you do not have good, decent, capable staff, those beautiful buildings will remain empty.

Mrs Russell

Some 14,000 places is quite a lot. You have talked about staffing them, but how does it look like it is going in terms of producing them?

Charlie Taylor

It is hard to say overall. We have seen some new bits of prisons come back on stream. Norwich was going through a very long-term refurbishment and it is beginning to fill up those finished cells. Other places are completely stuck. Birmingham has been stuck for years with two huge wings that have been closed because of various contractual issues. It is a similar issue at HMP Liverpool. You have prisons that need to be refurbished. You also have new house blocks being built. There are two huge house blocks being built that were due to open at Highpoint in Suffolk. There is also a big one opening at Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey. Again, both Highpoint and Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey have struggled to recruit enough staff. Building the places is only part of solving the problem. There are contractual delays with this stuff but the bigger problem is having enough good, capable, competent staff to be able to really run the place well and safely.

Vikki Slade

Can I come in on that? This is a bit more of a radical point: if 80% of the people in prison are there because they have re-offended, if prison is doing its job properly, why do we need 14,000 new places, or significantly more if you look at some political perspectives? Surely the answer is that what we build needs to be better, not more of it. Is it the right thing to be building more prison spaces?

Charlie Taylor

I am really glad you asked that question, because a great big debate has been going on for the last couple of years or so about prison population and the huge pressures on the prison population as a state. Nothing within this conversation has actually been about whether we could do rehabilitation a little better. The proven re-offending rate for prisoners is around 27% to 30% and it is higher for children. If you could bear down on that by 1% or 2% only—if there were proper drug treatment, if prisoners were involved in purposeful activity, if they had a job when they came out—that would actually make a significant dent in the overall prison population. These are people who are taking up a lot of space, even though they are coming in and out; they are coming back in for 56 days and out again for another 56 days. I could not agree with you more. If we were thinking more about rehabilitation and just seeing this as a population management issue, we would be able to bear down on the prison population in different ways.

Chair

You said earlier that it was more difficult than you had hoped to be able to gather and retain the data on what people move on to doing. Do you think that more effort is needed to collect and retain data so that you can measure what works?

Charlie Taylor

Yes, I will give you a couple of examples. We know that in Wormwood Scrubs and other jails, around 20% or 25% of prisoners leave homeless, but those are the only prisoners for whom we have data. They are the only prisoners who are being released on licence. If you are being released directly from court—so you go to court, get sentenced to time served and are sent out of the court—we have no idea what happens to those people. Also, we have no idea what happens to people who have completed their licence period because, again, they are free, no one is keeping tabs on them, and therefore they are just out in the community. Even the data that we have is a bit weak there. Similarly, we are pretty sceptical about the strength of the data on employment on release, because in a prison of 1,000 prisoners, it only measures a very small proportion of prisoners who are coming out, because again, we just do not have that data. It is hard to track someone who has been released from prison having discharged their offence and who is no longer on licence. It is hard to keep tabs on what those people get up to. Of course, if they re-offend, you can have a sense of that. The data on release is definitely not great and the numbers can hide the scale of the problem.

Chair

You said it is hard, but do you think it is useful to actually try?

Charlie Taylor

It is definitely useful to try. The better-quality data we can get on what happens to people when they come out from prison, the better it will be. There are certainly some areas where we think the data is not telling the whole story.

Mrs Russell

In which areas do you think the data is not telling the whole story?

Charlie Taylor

Homelessness is the one that worries me most. Of the prisoners that get released on licence from Wormwood Scrubs or Forest Bank, we are seeing about 20% to 25% of them going out homeless. There will also be prisoners who are being released directly from court, and many will be street homeless or will have a very precarious situation, so they will be sofa surfing. That technically counts as not being homeless but they may well be homeless very quickly. Or you have people going into supervised housing for a bit, but they then get removed after eight to 12 weeks, and again, some of those are going out homeless and we do not always know where they are going. I suspect the data that you get does not reflect the seriousness of the problem of prisoners going out homeless, and I believe the link between homelessness and re-offending is very strong.

Warinder Juss

I have a question about HMP Wandsworth and procurement. Back in May 2024, you put that prison into special measures because of the physical state of the prison, the endemic drug usage and high levels of self-harm and deaths. The response to what you did was the MOJ putting in £100 million for improvements. However, there seems to be a lack of awareness and knowledge about how and where that money has been spent. I understand that the Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the House of Lords, which is their equivalent of this Committee, are looking into this. Are you satisfied that in response to you putting that prison into special measures, the appropriate steps have been taken? Can you say more about how that money has been spent? I ask because we have had allegations such as £250,000 being spent on the installation of one new shower and £35,000 being spent to replace a shower head. It may be that you need to write to the Chair afterwards.

Charlie Taylor

Do not get me started on the procurement of repairs and work in prisons, because talking to governors, it is an enormous source of frustration. I remember inspecting Lincoln Prison a few years ago. It had been relying on temporary boilers at an enormous cost for seven years. It had a new boiler house but it had no new boilers. This stuff just happens all the time, where being able to procure and get stuff done is just not effective. I will give you one example that the governor told me. They wanted to get repairs done to some windows in the jail. These were not security windows, so a standard glazier could fit them. They got a quote from a local firm for £14,000. They were told they could not spend that money. They had to go through a procurement exercise. They did and they found a provider willing to do it for £47,000. The provider subcontracted it. Guess who they subcontracted it to? That kind of stuff happens all the time. The cost of getting stuff done is unbelievably slow and is a huge source of frustration for governors, and it is unbelievably expensive. This is a huge challenge. On Wandsworth specifically, we did that really awful inspection of Wandsworth. We went back for a review of progress and, actually, under the governorship of an excellent and very strong governor, Andy Davy, things have got better. He is now due to leave and it is therefore a jail that we will continue to keep a close eye on. Anecdotally, we hear this stuff a lot from governors, but in terms of the individual cost of things such as shower heads, I do not know the details but it certainly does not sound beyond the realms of possibility, given what governors have said to me.

Sir Ashley Fox

What you have described, Mr Taylor, is a scandalous waste of public money. What is the justification from the Ministry of Justice for the procurement exercise that you described?

Charlie Taylor

The official line is that this is public money, and we therefore need to follow the correct procurement processes. I understand that, but the constraints put on individual governors’ ability to spend money is really astonishing. The classic case is washing machines. I may have mentioned this before in this Committee, but a prison governor cannot spend more than 500 quid on an individual item without getting permission from people right up the food chain from them. If your washing machine breaks down on the wing—you will get very disgruntled prisoners very quickly if they cannot do washing—either you go through a long-term procurement exercise and get a decent industrial washing machine that will last years, or you go out and spend less than 500 quid on a domestic appliance that will break pretty quickly, but at least you will have something in place. That sort of thing happens a lot. I talked to a headteacher friend the other day, because I have not been a head for years and I wanted to know how things have changed. I said, “How much are you able to spend in your school before you need to get permission from your governing body?” They can spend 5,000 quid before they need to check in with their governors. In other words, the headteacher of a small primary school can spend 10 times more than a prison governor without having to go through a procurement process. This is partly because prison governors are civil servants, so they are more tied into some processes, but it is just a huge drag on governors’ ability to be able to get things done. Bear in mind that these are governors with 1,000 prisoners, with 200 or 300 hundred staff members, who have budgets of £25 million, whose phone rings on a Sunday morning to say someone has killed themself in the jail or that there has been some terrible incident. We put enormous responsibility on them, and we do not trust them to spend more than 500 quid. It is absurd.

Warinder Juss

I have had personal experience of this because I have gone into a prison and I have had a governor tell me about a light switch that needed to be replaced. They had to go through the procurement exercise—first, it delayed the placement of the light switch. They could not go to the local shop and get another switch, and it cost multiple times more.

Charlie Taylor

More experienced governors will push things as far as they can, but if you are a new governor coming into a prison, the rules are there and you have to follow them; you do not want to fall foul of these arrangements. It appears to be so risk-averse that we are actually putting these amazing professionals, who do an unbelievable job in incredibly difficult circumstances, in a position where we are not trusting them to do really basic stuff in their jail. We are not talking about great big security arrangements, building new walls and that kind of thing. We are talking about basic maintenance issues that they struggle to get done because they have to go through so many hoops to make it happen.

Chair

It has been really valuable to explore and shine a light on this. I am conscious of time and that we have a number of issues, not least IPP, which I know a number of Members want to ask about.

Janet Daby

I want to take you back to the recruitment and retention of prison staff and get a sense of how you would describe the morale of prison staff at present. Has anything changed during your time as chief inspector?

Charlie Taylor

The morale of prison staff varies. To some extent, it varies on how well the establishment is functioning. When you go to a prison that feels safe, is well run, and well organised—where prisoners feel cared for, staff are motivated, sickness levels are low and people can enjoy their job because they are well enough staffed to do the things about the job that they really enjoy—you find morale is pretty good there. We do a survey of prison staff on every inspection. On the other hand, prisons can also get into a vicious cycle where sickness levels go up, staff are frightened, not enjoying their work and are backing off prisoners. The level of risk is really high and you then get very high levels of staff turnover. It really varies between different establishments. When it is good, it is great. When it is bad, it is really bad.

Janet Daby

Would you say remoteness of areas can have an effect on recruitment of staff, or are there certain factors that are affecting the whole recruitment side of things?

Charlie Taylor

In certain bits of the country—often bits near the sea because, in effect, they can only recruit in one direction, such as the Isle of Sheppey or the Isle of Portland—things can be difficult. Also, in what tend to be wealthier bits of the country, such as the south-east, there are real challenges. In London, things are not always as bad because younger people often want to live there. The east of England is also really difficult to recruit in. As you go further north, things tend to get a little better. My other frustration in this area is how little control prison governors have over who ends up working in their jail. All the recruitment is done centrally by a central team. Of course, they are about filling the pipeline and not necessarily about being accountable for the quality of the people who come through it. When you talk to directors of private sector prisons, they are recruiting their own staff locally, as opposed to people who are just pulled in through the pipeline of the system and may or may not be any use. Governors will often say to me, “Within seconds we could tell that this person was not going to make it.”

Janet Daby

Are you picking up that governors would like to be part of that recruitment process?

Charlie Taylor

Yes, they would. They have a lot of work and are very busy. As a former headteacher, the idea that I would employ staff in my school without having met them, interviewed them, seen the whites of their eyes and understood what their values are is just not something I would do in 1,000 years. I suspect governors would feel the same about that. I will give you another anecdote. Things are often so bad that, for example, governors are responsible for recruiting the very lowest grade, which is the operational support grade. These are the most junior uniformed staff who are not in contact with prisoners but will do things like operate the gate and those sorts of things. They have told me more than once that they have people who have applied for a job as an operational support grade and the governor has said, “This person is palpably not capable of doing this job” and hey presto, six months later that person ends up in their prison as a fully qualified prison officer. We have even had a case where a prison officer was sacked by a governor under equal opportunity; I am not sure how this worked out but that prison officer just walked through the gate months later having been re-recruited into the service. You can imagine the frustration governors feel when dealing with those sorts of situations.

Mrs Russell

I am with you, Mr Taylor. I do not employ an admin assistant in my team without interviewing them personally. I do not have my office manager do it; I do it with her. None the less, because you have raised this before and I agree with you, it seems absolutely preposterous. I do not understand how you can create a successful culture in a prison if you do not recruit people with the same values you are trying to produce. What is the impediment to public sector prisons being allowed to do this themselves? Is there any statutory reason why they cannot?

Charlie Taylor

No. It will cost more for individual prisons and they will have to set it up. You will be told about a pilot at HMP Berwyn in north Wales, where it was encouraged to be able to do its own recruitment locally. A report was produced that said this did not go at all well, but I am pretty sceptical about all that—this is an area where governors would be able to do it well. They could get together in groups of prisons; they could do it within clusters. Of course, prison officers do not get face-to-face interviews either. Having a direct face-to-face interview with someone and really understanding what they are about, what their values are and what they can bring to your prison is just absolutely critical.

Mrs Russell

They do not get face-to-face interviews.

Charlie Taylor

Face-to-face interviews are critical.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

Mr Taylor, the examples you have described are frankly ludicrous, are they not? If a governor has said, “This person is palpably unsuitable for the role,” is there no mechanism where those individuals can be flagged in the system, so when they reapply in a different part of it, it triggers an alert, as opposed to them being able to effectively get in by the back door?

Charlie Taylor

Yes, and that is what this particular governor who told me this story was told. He was told that he should have done something, but the thing he was told he should have done did not make a huge amount of sense to me, so I do not think those flags are working in the way they ought to be and I do not think governors are aware of it. You would like to think that if you fire someone for being no good, they would not be coming back into your jail. Something is going badly wrong.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

Is that a failure of the MOJ for not disseminating that information so that governors are aware of the levers that are available to them?

Charlie Taylor

Yes, but I am not entirely sure the lever that is available is the right way of applying a lever anyway.

Janet Daby

I understand that the prison officer apprenticeship has stopped. Do you have a view on that?

Charlie Taylor

Do you mean the Unlocked graduates scheme?

Janet Daby

Yes.

Charlie Taylor

I am very disappointed about it. Some absolutely amazing people would never have come into prisons. Much like Teach First, you had amazing, bright, able people coming in who were interested in the role. Some have gone on to be outstanding leaders. The scheme was outstanding and I am really sorry that it does not exist anymore. Governors said to me that it was not just about the people who were coming in. They were actually pulling in other people in their wake—people who may have joined the service but were not really sure whether they wanted to do it or not, but they joined anyway and they were then being enthused by these Unlocked graduates who were showing them the possibilities of the job, and they were able to grow alongside the graduates themselves. I am really sorry it is gone.

Janet Daby

Do you know why it has gone, or have any view on that?

Chair

It went in April 2024.

Charlie Taylor

It did; it went very quickly. There are conflicting stories about it but I think when you have something great in a service that really struggles to get brilliant people, do not let it go.

Chair

I will hand over to Neil to start talking about the imprisonment for public protection.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

In August this year, the Prime Minister announced that as part of the Government’s plans to ease prison capacity issues, he was going to ask the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary to bring the injustice of IPP sentences to an end during this Parliament. We have not had any real detail on how that will work. You have broadly welcomed the principle behind it but you have cautioned that a careful approach needs to be taken for public safety reasons. If you were advising Government, what key features would you be looking at in those plans?

Charlie Taylor

First, it is enormously welcome that this has happened. The idea that you sentence someone for a crime they might or might not commit in the future is a great injustice. David Blunkett, under whom the offence was originally designated, has said exactly that as well and regrets it enormously. It is a good and positive move. However, these prisoners may have committed further offences while in custody. They may continue to pose a risk to the public. The scheme needs to be done in a thoughtful and measured way that combines an ending of this injustice to those individuals and makes sure that the public have some assurance that they will be protected when people come out. We often see that these are very troubled men who are so caught in the system and have struggled so hard for many years because of the uncertainty that surrounds them and their sentence that life is very difficult. There is an exciting innovation going on at HMP Aylesbury, where the phoenix wing has recently been set up for this particularly troubled group of prisoners. That sort of support will help to unpick those who are able to go on and go out and be successful and those who are going to need more support so that they will be able to do it.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

You have quite properly highlighted that these are high-risk individuals in a number of cases, and as a result this plan is high risk. How do you think the Government should mitigate that? You have touched on HMP Aylesbury. There may be other examples that would help us understand how they are going to mitigate what is a significant public safety issue.

Charlie Taylor

There is another very good programme. I was at HMP Featherston just outside Wolverhampton in the summer, and it was thinking closely about how it offers support for these particular men. It is about making sure that services coalesce around them so they get support while they are in prison to reduce their level of risk. Some have been locked up for long periods of time, and their risk has certainly been reduced, but ensuring that you can establish that the risk has been reduced is needed. It is also important to make sure that in the community there is some decent coalescence around them to support them back into the community. Overall, we really welcome this initiative. The inspectorate has written two extremely critical reports about the treatment of these prisoners over many years. It will not be easy, but it is a welcome innovation. The Government are doing the right thing.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

At its maximum, this Parliament has just under three years to run. Do you think it is realistic that in that time period, sufficient measures will be taken while these prisoners are still in custody to ensure that they can be safe for release and then transition into society?

Charlie Taylor

It is very hard for me to say because this is really on a case-by-case basis about individual levels of risk. The principle is now established that this is a sentence that has now ended and should end. These prisoners are caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare. You can see them coming in prisons—they are trapped and haunted by their experience of just feeling that whatever they do they are unable to get out. The principles are right, but the devil will be in the detail and we will wait to see what the policy is like and what the outcomes are for these prisoners over the course of time.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

Do you have any views on the specific support or additional support that would be required for these prisoners upon release?

Charlie Taylor

Again, it depends on individuals. Prisons are releasing risky people all the time. Every week, 1,000 prisoners leave jail and a number of those are very risky. Therefore, they will be, for example, subject to various levels of MAPPA—multi-agency public protection arrangements—and will get different levels of intervention from probation services. In more extreme cases, they will get very specialised support and very close monitoring from the police as well as probation services. It is about assessing the level of risk for these men as they come out and making sure that the package that is set up around them is suitable to be able to support them back into the community while also protecting the public.

Dr Shastri-Hurst

It is one thing for a Government to set an objective or an aspiration, but it is a very different thing to deliver it, and to do so on time. If the Government fail to deliver on this aim by the end of the Parliament, do you envisage any detrimental consequences arising out of that?

Charlie Taylor

Yes. You can end up just leaving these prisoners dangling for a crime that they committed a long time ago, but ultimately the sentence was for a crime that they might yet commit in the future. You cannot have a justice system that operates in that way; that is not justice in my opinion.

Vikki Slade

We know that of those still in prison about 800 to 850 have never been released, but 1,400 are there because they have been recalled, sometimes for something unrelated to a crime. Many of those people who have been recalled cannot go back through the system of release again until they can access the courses, which often have waiting lists of a year or more, are in a different part of the country or are not physically possible to get into. What suggestions would you make about how that process can be made better? If people have been recalled and there is a need for them to do a course, presumably that course still needs to be done, so what suggestions would you make about how that process can be made better?

Charlie Taylor

This is a huge fight—not only for IPP prisoners but for other prisoners—whereby on their sentence plan they have a course that they have to complete. They know that if they have not completed that course when they go in front of the Parole Board, the Parole Board is likely to knock them back. They are nevertheless locked up in a jail where that course is not available or where the waiting list is so long that they are not going to be able to do it in a realistic amount of time. It is not just about them getting released; it is also about them getting an opportunity to spend time in open prisons. Referring back to Dr Shastri-Hurst’s point about the things that need to take place, getting IPP prisoners into open prisons is, again, a really good way of gradually integrating people who are massively institutionalised back into the community.

Janet Daby

This is a big area for the Government, and it is an issue that has been going on for some time. Is there anything else that you think would be helpful for the Committee to know as this becomes clearer, in terms of how the Government will manage it?

Charlie Taylor

It will be really interesting to look at how things pan out. It is early days at the phoenix unit at HMP Aylesbury, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out over time and the extent to which they can take on the challenges of men who are—in some cases—very troubled, very caught within the system, and who have had lots of difficulties while in prison. It will be good to see the extent to which the work in HMP Aylesbury and the brilliant governor, Kevin Marshall-Clarke, will be able to support those prisoners to go out successfully. I am optimistic that that jail is operating well and will do a good job of it. Let’s wait and see.

Tessa Munt

I have a very quick question about the Rudd review. I recognise that her aims are wider than your inspectorate’s stuff, but I just wondered whether she has contacted you?

Charlie Taylor

Certainly, and we were delighted to host her on an inspection at HMP Bristol a couple of weeks ago. I have also been involved in a couple of meetings and roundtables with her looking at security and staffing.

Tessa Munt

What chances might she have of achieving her objectives—tackling crime, making prisons safer and delivering those reforms—given that there are quite a lot of reports on all the things that might not be functioning as well as they should. How do you feel about that?

Charlie Taylor

Ultimately, it is a political matter. I have no doubt that Amber Rudd's recommendations will be strong and offer tangible solutions to the problems. Ultimately though, these are political decisions that will need to be made, and they will be made within a system that sometimes struggles to move at pace and be innovative, as we discussed. It is a challenge, but I am sure the proposals will be excellent and full of lots of good ideas, but ultimately, it is for Ministers to take that on.

Chair

In a few months, you will be handing over to your successor after more than six years. What issues would you advise your successor to prioritise, and what advice would you give to them so that they will be successful in the role?

Charlie Taylor

Some of the issues will remain the same. The issue of drugs and drones will continue. The recruitment and retention of staff is critical. The more I do this job and the longer I have been in this role, the more I think that the role of the governor is so critical. They are the most dedicated, most impressive public servants that I have come across in a long career. They work unbelievably hard in often unimaginably difficult circumstances and they do amazing things. But the system does not always help them to be the best they can be, which can be a big source of frustration. We need to really think about what we want governors to be doing and how they should be spending their time. Do we want them to be sitting, tapping away at a computer screen, or plodding through another HR issue or Government procurement exercise? Or do we want them to be out there leading their prison, setting an example and driving forward improvement? At the moment, we have a system that is constraining some outstanding professionals from being able to do their job, so to focus on that and to really think about leadership in prisons is critical.

Chair

If you could resolve just one issue facing our prisons, what would it be? Would it be that?

Charlie Taylor

The temptation is to say no drugs as that would make a huge difference, but I would also say leadership: giving governors accountability and responsibility. If you allow me a real fantasy, it is drugs, but if it is something more prosaic, it is about leadership.

Chair

Finally, can I ask where this Committee can add the greatest value in scrutinising the Government’s work on prisons?

Charlie Taylor

Recruitment is critical: who is coming in, how good they are, how well they have been trained, how capable they are and how long they stick around for when they are trained. That pathway is really critical. If we are going to open 14,000 new places by the end of the decade, there will have to be a lot of thinking done around that area. This is less exciting but the issue of procurement and being able to just get stuff done is a great source of frustration. It is not that governors or directors in the public sector are better; they are not better. There are some great people in both types of prisons. If you talk to people who have moved into the private sector from public sector prisons, they will say, “I am able to get stuff done here in a way that I could not when I was a governor in the public sector.” We need to think about the constraints that stop people from being able to do that. To what extent are we gold-plating processes in order to make sure that no one ever breaks a rule, and in doing so constraining people so much that while they might not do anything wrong, they are not able to flourish either?

Chair

That brings us to the end of our questioning. I would like to thank you for your time and for your answers, and to wish you luck in the future when you have handed over the baton to the next chief inspector of prisons.