Failings at Birmingham prison reflect broader crisis, MOJ is warned

The Ministry of Justice has been warned that failings at a privately run Birmingham prison reflect a broader prison crisis, as overcrowding and dwindling resources lead to increases in violence, drug use and self-harm in jails across England and Wales.

HMP Birmingham was dramatically taken from the control of outsourcing giant G4S and returned to public governance on Monday after a damning inspection that uncovered rife drug abuse, violence and filthy conditions at the jail.

Earlier this year, the high number of deaths at the prison, including suicides and drug overdoses, came under scrutiny.

A 14-hour riot involving at least 500 prisoners in December 2016 has been cited as a pivotal point in the jail’s deterioration, although a separate investigation published on Monday revealed problems at the jail had been escalating for months prior to the disturbance.

The findings, which the government released on Monday under freedom of information laws after initially refusing to publish, said that controllers – MoJ representatives based in private prisons – would have been reporting to the department on escalating violence months prior to the riot in December 2016.

Kevin Lockyer, a former prison governor, who was called in to handle a previous major private prison crisis in 2002, told the Guardian that problems in Birmingham were an indictment of government cuts, adding that MoJ controllers may have been “asleep at the wheel”.

(January 1, 2010)

Jimmy Mubenga, 46, an Angolan deportee, dies after being restrained and held down by three G4S guards on a British Airways flight due to depart from Heathrow airport. The guards are later cleared of manslaughter.

(January 1, 2013)

The Serious Fraud Office investigates G4S for alleged overcharging for tagging criminals in England and Wales, claiming it charged for tagging people who were still in prison, out of the country or dead. The firm is later cleared of fraud but agrees to pay a settlement of £109m.

(January 1, 2015)

Six members of staff are dismissed for gross misconduct at the G4S-operated Rainsbrook secure training centre for children in Rugby. An Ofsted inspection found some staff were on drugs while on duty, colluded with detainees and behaved “extremely inappropriately”. G4S loses the contract later that year.

(January 1, 2016)

Eleven members of staff at Medway secure training centre are suspended or sacked after a BBC documentary alleges staff inappropriately restrained inmates and falsified statistics to improve the facility’s record. At least 10 arrests are made.

Later in the same year, hundreds of prisoners at the G4S-run HMP Birmingham take part in a riot, blaming poor staffing levels, food and medical care and being kept on lockdown in their cells all day.

(August 20, 2018)

The government takes control of Birmingham prison after a damning inspection found inmates used drink, drugs and violence with impunity and corridors were littered with cockroaches, blood and vomit.

Lockyer, who was appointed to run Ashfield young offender institution in 2002 after the failure of its private provider, said: “You don’t end up with Birmingham in the state it is in without somebody noticing it. These are not issues that leap out from the undergrowth.

“Ministers must accept they took too many resources out too quickly. It starts with acknowledging that we are demonstrably failing, that as a supposedly leading, first-world, civilised society the state of our prisons is a source of deep societal shame.”

Lockyer, who was deputy governor at HMP Belmarsh, governor of HMYOI Portland and later a deputy director of the National Offender Management Service at the MoJ, said the intervention was an attempt by the ministry to look decisive. “Changing the governor – or taking over a private prison temporarily – is like changing football managers after a run of bad results: it looks good, but it doesn’t deal with any of the underlying issues,” he said.

The urgent notification process invoked by the chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke, which sparked the government’s decision to bring the prison under state control, has happened twice previously in relation to public prisons.

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “This is a dramatic intervention following yet another deeply disturbing report about an overcrowded local prison. The depressing truth is that it puts Birmingham in the same category as a succession of other prisons doing the same job – trying to look after far too many people, most spending just a few weeks in custody. It shows a system as well as a prison in crisis, and it’s not getting better.”

A former prison service director led the investigation into the 2016 riot, which found that the disturbance could have been brought to a halt in 30 minutes.

The mass disturbance broke out on four wings of HMP Birmingham on the morning of 16 December 2016, after two men climbed on the netting in one of the wings and, along with four other inmates, were able to seize a set of keys.

Chronic staff shortages contributed in part to a breakdown in authority and increasing instability ultimately led to prisoners policing themselves, the investigation found.

The June 2017 report said that the governor of the prison assessed the stability of the jail to be “low” in every week of 2016 – a determination that would have been included in the MoJ controllers’ monthly reports.

An extract from a controller’s report in June 2016 highlighted huge numbers of assaults, as well as harm.

“We concluded that senior managers did not appreciate the significance of data demonstrating instability at Birmingham,” the report reads. “We are concerned that this culture of acceptance masked a worsening picture of violence, which combined with a lack of effective sanctions mean prisoner behaviour was unregulated.”

The former justice minister Phillip Lee, who resigned in June, called for a review of all government private finance initiative (PFI) contracts and accused companies of “ripping off taxpayers”.

He wrote on Twitter: “This goes far deeper than #HMPBirmingham. A proper review of ALL govt PFI contracts delivering vital public services is long overdue because companies are currently ripping off taxpayers. And the civil service needs far better capacity to deal with them.”

In a second tweet, he added: “When at @MoJGovUK, I was frustrated by the situation with Oakhill STC [secure training centre] and determined to sort it out. Complex contractual & financing arrangements mean we pay nearly £18m/year for ~80 places. I urge every Minister with a PFI contract to get very interested in the details....”

Richard Burgon, the shadow justice secetary, called for a temporary ban on further privatisation of the justice sector. “Once again we see the dangerous consequences of the ever-greater privatisation of our justice system,” he said.

“HMP Birmingham was the first publicly run prison transferred to the private sector. This must be a nail in the coffin for the flawed idea of prison privatisation. The government must scrap its recently announced plans to build yet more private prisons.”

But Lockyer said questions about G4S’s management of the prison could turn out to be a cover for deeper issues in the system.

“This is about an underlying malaise in the prison system, driven by Ken Clarke’s and Chris Grayling’s decisions to roll over for the Treasury to cut massive resources very quickly,” he said. “There is nobody with any kind of experience. You need to have people who know more about running prisons than prisoners.”

The MoJ said that the framework for monitoring the performance of private prisons includes the inspectorate, the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) and prisons ombudsman, as well as the controllers. The department is able to issue “improvement notices” to prisons, which it did in March to Birmingham. In addition, both the prisons minister, Rory Stewart, and the justice secretary, David Gauke, visited Birmingham in person.

But the government bears a share of the blame for the state of HMP Birmingham, Stewart said on Monday.

“This is partly the responsibility of me, as prisons minister, of the government, and of G4S, which is why we have taken this unprecedented step of stepping in, taking control of the prison,” Stewart told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.