Liverpool prison has 'worst conditions inspectors have seen'

Prison chiefs have been summoned next week to explain to MPs their “abject failure” over living conditions in Liverpool prison, which have been described by inspectors as the worst they can recall.

Their official inspection report, published on Friday, highlights the plight of one prisoner with complex mental health needs who was left for weeks in a dark and damp cell with no furniture other than a bed, broken windows, exposed wires and a filthy blocked lavatory.

It took the personal intervention of the chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke, to get him moved “from such appalling conditions”.

The Liverpool report follows the decision by the chief inspector to invoke a new procedure for the first time to demand urgent action by the new justice secretary, David Gauke, to intervene at Nottingham prison, which inspectors found last week to be “fundamentally unsafe”. Gauke formally has 28 days to respond.

The report of the official inspection at HMP Liverpool carried out in September says many of the 1,155 prisoners had to endure squalid living conditions with rats, cockroaches, damp, dirt, hundreds of broken windows with jagged glass in the frames and filthy or leaking toilets. Inspectors also reported seeing rats in rubbish piles.

The chief inspector says he was told by a senior member of staff that the rat-infested piles of rubbish had not been cleared by prisoners working as cleaning orderlies because they presented a health and safety risk

“It was so bad that external contractors were to be brought in to deal with it. In other words, this part of the jail had become so dirty, infested and hazardous to health that it could not be cleaned.”

The chief inspector reveals the prison also had a backlog of about 2,000 maintenance tasks.

“It is hard to understand how the leadership of the prison could have allowed the situation to deteriorate to this extent … The inspection team was highly experienced and could not recall having seen worse living conditions than those at HMP Liverpool,” said Clarke.

“We could see no credible plan to address these basic issues. On the contrary, the presence of inspectors seemed to provoke some piecemeal and superficial attempts at cleaning and the like, but the fear was that this would stop as soon we left, which is clearly what happened after the last inspection.”

The report says half the prisoners remained locked in their cells during the working day, violence of all kinds had increased since the previous inspection in 2015, and nearly two-thirds of prisoners said it was easy or very easy to obtain drugs.

Drug-carrying drones were described as a serious problem, with staff recovering 32 in the six months before the inspection.

Clarke, a former head of the Metropolitan police counter-terrorism command, makes clear that blame for the situation rests on the national leadership of the prison service as much as local prison governors.

“We saw clear evidence that local prison managers had sought help from regional and national management to improve conditions they knew to be unacceptable long before our arrival, but the resulting support was inadequate and had made little impact on outcomes for prisoners,” concludes the chief inspector, describing the “abject failure of HMP Liverpool to offer a safe, decent and purposeful environment”.

Michael Spurr, the chief executive of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, responded to the report, saying the conditions at Liverpool were unacceptable. A new governor was appointed following the inspection, the prison’s capacity was reduced by 172 places and the maintenance backlog halved, and an action plan was being published on Friday.

“Liverpool has a dedicated staff who are committed to providing a safe and decent environment for prisoners. The governor will get the support she needs to deliver the action plan and make the changes necessary to substantially improve the performance and conditions at the prison,” said Spurr.

But Bob Neill, the Conservative chair of the Commons justice committee, said the report was one of the worst he had seen and he was sceptical the response would resolve the problems. He announced he was taking the unusual step of summoning prison chiefs next week to consider their response.

“A situation as bad as this raises urgent questions for the prison’s leadership, regional and national management and for the government, who seem to have collectively failed in their duty,” he said.