Prison and Probation Service
House of Lords · Lords Chamber · 17 Sep 2026 · 22 speeches · Official Report
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
That this House takes note of the state of the prison and probation service in England and Wales.
My Lords, I thank all who will contribute this afternoon. It is an impressive list, and I am looking forward to hearing some valuable contributions to what is, at the present time, a very important subject. I thank you for making time after a busy week. I particularly welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, who is making his maiden speech here. I am looking forward to hearing his wisdom, of which he has much in this regard. I received a very supportive email from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, who is prisons Bishop. She is at the College of Bishops this week and is unable to attend, but she wants us to know that she would have been here if she could have been. This is a highly relevant debate to the public. The current state of our Prison and Probation Service constantly plays out on front pages of newspapers and online media sites. One of my pleas today is for politicians to resist the media drama, particularly of a single case, and keep rehabilitation at the forefront. The fact is that punishment is deprivation of liberty, not grim conditions. On today’s news, we heard that temporary prefabricated cells, sized for one, are now being fitted with bunk beds. Ten years ago, or more, former Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick described such circumstances to the Commons Justice Committee, saying that many prisoners are now effectively living in toilets. Headlines about prison spaces running out should not be ignored. In August 2026, the total...
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on securing this debate and I am grateful for how he opened it. I thought he was going to be a little more critical and, in turn, I have written a counter speech. I want to speak primarily about rehabilitation, which he mainly focused on. As he said, one of the big influencing factors has been 30 years of sentence inflation, with more and more, and longer and longer, sentences being handed out. I too look forward to the maiden speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, with great interest in what he may say on this. There have been 30 years of underinvestment, by all Governments, in the courts, prisons, the probation services and of course rehabilitation, which has been the Cinderella right at the end of the line. However, services have been particularly hollowed out since 2010, when George Osborne’s austerity programme was introduced. Then there was the calamitous, I believe, social experiment of the part-privatisation of the probation service by the Conservative Government, as well as a failure to build new prison places-we are still waiting for new ones to come on stream, as has just been mentioned. In 2024, Labour inherited a demoralised and understaffed workforce, with prisons almost full to capacity. We were almost at a point where, without radical action, the country faced the prospect that courts would not be able to send criminals to jail, because there were no places to incarcerate them. I am glad to...
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and I join him in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, not only on the tremendous work that he has done in this particular area but for securing the debate and his excellent opening speech. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson. Just over a year ago, the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee, which I chair, published Better Prisons, Less Crime . We quoted witnesses who described the prison service operating in, or on the verge of, crisis. We acknowledged the failures of successive Governments, but our purpose was not to catalogue failure: it was to identify practical ways forward. Echoing what the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, said, our starting point was simple: we ought to understand the role of prisons. We said that punishment for the prisoner is the loss of liberty and the role of prisons is to protect the public by reducing reoffending. We said that required purposeful activity, education and training, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke said, treatment for mental health, drug, alcohol and gambling problems, and preparation for life after release. It also requires relationships, as again the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, said, particularly family relationships. They are really important, yet distance from home, restrictive visiting arrangements and limited digital access can make contact unnecessarily difficult. Family contact cannot and must not be treated as...
I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and his most interesting speech. This is an excellent debate on crucial issues, and I am so glad that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has managed to bring it forward. I also say how glad I am that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, has joined us. He will add a great deal to this House with his expertise on criminal law. I have been looking at another report: one by the Justice Select Committee of the other place called E nding the C ycle of R eoffending . It sets out, in stark terms, the present state of the prison estate: the lack of adequate education of prisoners or purposeful activity, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Foster; the failure to educate children and young people; the lack of sufficient health and welfare provision, particularly for those with mental health or behavioural problems; gross overcrowding; and, as has been said, prisoners being in cells for most of the 24 hours. There is a disrepair of prisons. Princetown was closed very shortly after the last Government renewed the lease, even though they knew that the prison would have to be closed. There are problems with recruitment and retention of prison officers, and I am not surprised. There is a lack of training of prison officers, not only initially but on promotion. It was suggested in the Justice Committee report that governors needed some training. It points out that there is a lack of involvement by governors and opportunity for them to make...
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I also express my appreciation for the outstanding speech of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and thank him for introducing this debate. I propose to address only one point, already raised by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath: the question of recalls to custody. Let us concentrate on that for a moment. In the past four years, recalls to custody of prisoners released under licence have more than doubled. As has already been pointed out, in the last year there were 51,000 recalls to prison; that exceeds the number of persons sentenced by the courts to prison, which was 47,000. For the first time, recalls now are greater than persons going to prison in the first place. A recall rate of 50,000 represents a rate of about one in five of those under supervision. As the charity Nacro points out, in 2017 the rate was about one in 13. Have we seen an increase in risk in the last 10 years? What is going on here? There is no evidence of increase in risk, but now, according to Nacro, for every 10 beds freed up by the release of a prisoner, nine are refilled by recalls to custody. This highly regrettable situation threatens seriously to undermine the Government’s early-release scheme. As has already been pointed out by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, what is the point of early release if it is followed by a recall? Clearly, the present situation also greatly complicates the...
My Lords, it is with real diffidence that I rise just three days after my introduction. But the way in which we treat those convicted of crime, and in particular what happens to them when both in custody and in the community, has been a real interest of mine for some 60 years. It stems from my time as an undergraduate visiting Oxford prison and being involved in organising camps for children from approved schools; and later on in relation to the mental health of those in custody-an interest encouraged in me by my late father, who was a consultant psychiatrist. This was in Liverpool, which for over 40 years I was proud to call my home. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for initiating this debate and thus allowing me the opportunity to express some views on this critical area. I must first, however, express my thanks to my two splendid supporters, the noble and learned Lords, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers and Lord Burnett of Maldon, who were both Chief Justices for whom I worked, along with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, the late and very much-lamented Lord Judge, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, to whom I also pay tribute. I would also like to thank the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and those in the convenor’s office for their kindness and encouragement and express my real appreciation to the Clerk of the Parliaments, Black Rod and all those who work in this House and who have been so generous with the time they have given to...
My Lords, it is a very special privilege first to have listened to the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Leveson of Liverpool and now to have the chance to add a few remarks. I wish first to convey the apologies of my noble and learned friends Lord Burnett and Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers. Events elsewhere have detained them, and they are unable to be present, but I have that pleasure. It is now more than a quarter of a century ago that, as what I still think of as youngish judges-though, alas, no longer so, I think I can safely say-we started to work together with responsibility for the circuit system and, in particular, for the way in which criminal justice was administered by the courts under the leadership of that great Chief Justice, Lord Judge. Lord Judge would have been especially proud and delighted to have been here today because he would have seen this as an inevitability. Like Lord Judge, my noble and learned friend Lord Leveson had enormous experience of the common law across all its aspects, but particularly in criminal justice, and he brought that experience to bear both in trials and on appeals, and, as importantly, in the leadership he gave in the successive appointments he held to improving the criminal justice system, and in the many reports and reviews he has conducted to that end. But his experience is much wider. I have not the time to go through it all, but one particular example occupies the time of your Lordships’ House from time to time,...
My Lords, not for the first time, I am feeling a bit outclassed and overawed by the legal and judicial expertise in this place that has produced so many excellent speeches. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for inviting us to talk about the state of prisons and probation services. However, I want to start by making some broader points about context. During the week, we have had the extraordinary sight of 92% of the citizens of an Oxford village, Piddington, population 358, voting in a symbolic referendum to become independent from the United Kingdom. In interviews with residents, there has been a common theme: the state is exposing them to danger. Housing 1,250 young male asylum seekers in nearby Bicester garrison means: “Our safety, our security and our freedoms will be under threat”. To paraphrase one woman: “If these men need government leaflets to explain that sexually abusing children or raping women is wrong, I’m frightened to go out alone. I will become a prisoner in my own house”. That is my theme, in a way. The sentiment of being a prisoner in your own house is not confined to leafy villages but is felt in towns and cities throughout the country. It is not confined to asylum policies. One key issue that has been a lightning rod for worries that state policies are indifferent to public safety is the early release scheme-for example, those women who now feel frightened in their own homes as victims of domestic abuse, worried that their early released...
Order. The time limit is eight minutes.
I congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on introducing this debate and thank him for doing so with his usual calmness and analysis. Every time he speaks on this subject-and he is a renowned expert-the House listens with great care, and we did so again today. I also welcome and congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, both on his arrival here and on his maiden speech. He should not feel in the least bit embarrassed about waiting only two or three days after his introduction before addressing the House. He should have done so on the first day, and on the second and on the third, and I hope that he will on many days after this because, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, so correctly pointed out, he was a judge and will be a Member of this House who will provide great wisdom and analysis and a great sense of justice on anything to which he brings his mind to bear. Whilst I have them sitting there, I want to thank both those noble and learned Lords for helping me, just over 16 years ago, with the introduction of the deferred prosecution agreement. They, as successor Presidents of the Queen’s Bench Division, assisted me in my political guise, with them in their judges’ role, to bring that criminal justice tool into fruition. It seems a little strange that, when I last appeared in front of the then Sir Brian Leveson, when he was sitting in court, he was about 20 feet above me; the layout of this Chamber allows me to be 10 feet above him. I...
My Lords, I too have very little experience in this area, but I felt I did have something worth saying from a professional point of view. My experience of prisons is not personal but, while I was on call at Hammersmith Hospital, I did go inside prisons to see sick patients when they were quite seriously ill. It was being ignored, but finally there was no doctor present. I was the obstetrician on call at the hospital and ordinarily I dealt with deliveries and surgeries. However, there was nobody else to see the male inmates at Wormwood Scrubs. I saw the absolute squalor, the appalling circumstances, the lack of hope and the complete negligence in people’s understanding of what was behind these people’s suffering. When one such patient was brought to Hammersmith Hospital still handcuffed, so I could not actually examine his abdomen, I realised how far we had sunk as a society. There was another patient who was in custody for several years. His wife was a patient of mine who had been desperate for children; she had been trying for a child for almost 10 years and she was getting older and older. Her husband had recently been sentenced and was in prison for, I think, four years. I had spent a year trying to persuade the authorities, who were completely indifferent, including many people in the Home Office, that we needed to get some sperm from this man. We did not need to do in vitro fertilisation; simple artificial insemination was all we needed. It was the most difficult tussle...
It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this important debate, and I pay tribute to all the work he does on this subject. I also welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, and congratulate him on his excellent maiden speech. As the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, spoke about so articulately, the pressures on our Prison and Probation Service are stark. We have already heard that the Government have announced up to £700 million of additional funding for probation and community services, alongside at least 1,300 additional trainee probation officers in 2026-27. However, as we heard from many today, the strain on probation has been building for a long time, and many in the justice system have raised serious concerns about whether even this substantial investment will meet the scale of the challenge. Finding and retaining workforce is a major challenge, while case loads continue to rise. The latest workforce figures, published in August, show that the Probation Service is almost 2,000 full-time equivalent officers below its target level; that is a significant gap. The changes to early-release arrangements next month will mean that probation has even more on its plate, especially with the increased emphasis on intense supervision, electronic tagging and monitoring, alongside the increased casework. Where does that leave effective and meaningful rehabilitation, especially when reoffending rates remain high? If...
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for providing the opportunity for such a vital debate. I am delighted to see the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, sitting on the Cross Benches. I thank him for his excellent and wise but very sobering maiden speech. I speak as the honorary president of the Zahid Mubarek Trust-ZMT-which was founded some 25 years ago following the murder of Zahid while on remand in a young offender institution. He was placed in a cell with a known racist who had a history of extreme violence. The subsequent public inquiry uncovered 186 missed opportunities to protect Zahid and exposed institutional racism within the Prison Service. The ZMT exists to promote racial equality in prisons and runs innovative programmes to enable greater racial equality and programmes on leadership. In the 25 years since the murder of Zahid, there has been a series of initiatives and reviews to improve racial equality in the Prison Service and the criminal justice system. Despite this, there is worrying evidence of significant racial disparities in both prisons and more widely in criminal justice. Some 27% of the prison population in England and Wales comes from ethnic communities. However, if the prison population were to reflect the UK’s ethnic make-up, there would be 9,000 fewer men and boys in prison. Offenders from ethnic minorities have a disproportionately higher likelihood of receiving custodial sentences, even after taking higher not guilty plea rates into...
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for introducing this debate and all noble Lords for their speeches today, with congratulations to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson of Liverpool, on his excellent maiden speech. The capacity of prisons across the country remains a concerning problem, with the prison population expected to reach between 92,400 and 100,000 by November 2032. Although the Government have pledged 14,000 new prison places by 2031, serious progress is needed to meet that target-progress that is not yet apparent. The Government have delivered 700 fewer prison cells than last year and no new prisons have been planned or approved since the Labour Government took office in 2024. These new prisons will be essential to increasing prison capacity, so I hope there will be evidence as to how they will reach that pledge. There is also a problem now. The problem of immediate availability is similarly severe. As was discussed only last week on the criminal justice reform Statement, there are “4,000 operational prison places not in use ”.-[ Official Report , 8/9/26; col. 568.] The Minister did not set out what steps the Government were taking to ensure that these existing places could be utilised, so I pose the same question: how will the Government address the issues of officer shortages to allow those places to be used? We have heard from the sector that retention is a huge problem among prison officers. What specific steps are Ministers taking to improve...
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this debate and his excellent opening speech. The noble Lord has campaigned tirelessly on prison reform as he has on family life, so he unsurprisingly stressed, with others, the importance of prisoners’ contact with their families. We have heard a brilliant, sympathetic and far-reaching maiden speech from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson-our “new boy”, as he modestly described himself. We, for our part, are honoured to have such an extremely distinguished new boy and will continue to benefit greatly in this House from his wisdom, incisiveness and humanity. This Government inherited a crisis in our Prison and Probation Service. Along with the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, for the progress he made in tackling this as Prisons Minister. His presence in the Government will be missed. As the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said, until the Sentencing Act the threat of our criminal justice collapsing for want of prison space was all too real. The last Government recognised this problem far too late and introduced a haphazard series of crisis early-release schemes, but without offering any long-term solution. We have at last put the management of determinate sentences on a more organised footing, moving towards an earned progression model and restructuring such sentences in an orderly way, with the first third of sentences to be spent in custody and the second third, barring bad...
My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this important debate and all noble Lords who have contributed this afternoon to what has been a sober but very humane debate. Noble Lords will know that not every debate about prisons has those characteristics, so I very much appreciate that. For many years, the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has brought sustained attention to the purpose of imprisonment and to the vital role that families and strong, stable relationships can play in rehabilitation. We are very grateful to him. I declare my own interest: I was the lead non-executive director of HMPPS until 2025. I chaired its agency board and had the pleasure and the privilege of meeting the noble Lord and talking with him, particularly about the work my then colleagues at HMPPS were doing on the relational model, which he was a champion of and is at the heart of what we are all discussing. I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, on a magnificent maiden speech. I am proud to say that I have read both parts of the noble and learned Lord’s court review, twice. He looks shocked, but I have, and I look forward to working with him very closely, as does everyone at the Ministry of Justice. I will start with the most immediate pressure on prison capacity. I take the challenge from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, not to indulge in the blame game very seriously, and I will try not to. I will also try not to recite lots of things other people...
I am the barrier between everyone and Recess. This has been a good, valuable and collaborative debate. We have worked together. There has not been partisanship. That is important because this is an important and, to be quite frank, depressing subject. The reasons for depression have become apparent from many of the speeches today. I compliment every Member who has contributed today. There have been excellent contributions. I hope that the Hansard of this debate will get some publicity because it needs it. People need to see clearly the problems that are going on in the prison estate, but they also need to see how we can work together and co-operate. I very much liked the emphasis on the prisoner as a human being, which was mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, and the noble Lord, Lord Winston, but also came over in many speeches. I concur with everybody that it was an honour to have the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, make his maiden speech in this debate. It was a hugely valuable contribution. I am not going to go on and on because we need to get to Recess and it has been a long day. I thank noble Lords for their valuable contributions. I hope the debate gets widespread impact across Parliament, into the departments of government and out there to the wider public so that they understand the problems in the prison estate at the moment. Motion agreed.
My Lords, we are about to go into Recess, so I take this opportunity to thank all the staff of the House for their hard work and support and wish them and, indeed, all noble Lords a restful Recess. I hope noble Lords enjoy their party conference, if they are attending.
House adjourned at 6.08 pm.