Separation Centres: Terrorist Offenders

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

Commons Urgent Question

The following Answer to an Urgent Question was given in the House of Commons on Thursday 20 November.

“The right honourable Gentleman raises a very important question. Separation centres are a vital part of our strategy to manage those who pose the most significant terrorist risk. Following the horrific attack at HMP Frankland in April this year, we took immediate action to ensure safety in our separation centres. Today, everyone is safe and a stringent regime remains in place.

Our prison officers are some of the hardest working and bravest public servants in this country. It is right that they feel safe as they work to protect the public. That is why, following the attack at Frankland, we mandated the use of protective body armour in our highest-risk units, including our SCs, for the first time. The Deputy Prime Minister has recently announced a further £15 million investment in safety equipment, including to roll out up to 10,000 pieces of body armour to up to 500 staff trained in the use of Tasers.

The Abu judgment is very fact-specific and does not threaten the integrity of the separation centres themselves. This Government take the judgment and others that were referenced very seriously. We are clear that any decision regarding segregation must comply with prison rules and human rights obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights. We are working to ensure that our referral process is robust and are strengthening our ability to defend against legal challenges. Specialist staff continue to assess referrals rigorously, and placements are made only where the criteria are met.

Let me be clear: the Government will always put national security first. Separation centres remain an essential operational tool, and we will continue to use these specialist units to protect the public from the most dangerous offenders”.

15:36

[Lord Keen of Elie (Con)]

My Lords, we are told that the independent review into separation centres’ operation, following the attack at His Majesty’s Prison Frankland, has been completed but remains unpublished. Given that the continued non-disclosure of its findings undermines transparency and accountability, will the Minister tell us why the review has not been published and when it will be published? Could he also explain what interim changes have already been made to the regime to ensure that vulnerable staff and other prisoners are not exposed to unacceptable risks in the meantime?

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)]

The Government are carefully considering the findings of Jonathan Hall KC’s independent review into the operation of separation centres, which was commissioned following the dreadful attack at HMP Frankland in April. We will publish Mr Hall’s report and our response in due course—I would add imminently. On the regimes in our separation centres, Members of your Lordships’ House will be pleased to know that I have been to see the centre at HMP Frankland to meet a number of the staff, who are incredibly brave and professional public servants. We are making a number of operational improvements to improve their safety as well.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, a finding by the High Court that any prisoner in England, whoever they may may be, has been subjected to inhumane or degrading treatment shames us all. We all understand the need for separation centres for high-risk terrorist offenders, but can the noble Lord say what steps the Government will now take, in the light of the Abu judgment, to ensure that prisoners in separation centres are not so cut off from human contact as to endanger their mental health, and that all such prisoners have access to adequate psychiatric care, as Abu did not?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

Separation centres protect the public from the most serious offenders. A small number of prisoners are held in these centres. The regime is purposeful activity, limited association and rehabilitation; the noble Lord will know that rehabilitation is really important to me. Having met the staff who work in separation centres, it is very clear that they are not all classically trained prison officers. A number are psychiatrists, psychologists, experts in security and so on. There is a team effort to make sure we run good regimes that have a real focus on rehabilitation. I look forward to getting into more of the detail on Jonathan Hall’s report when it and its recommendations are published because it will be very helpful to us as we look to the future of how we run these very specialist areas of the justice system.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Does my noble friend agree that there is no inconsistency between having adequate separation of terrorism offenders and complying with our most basic and fundamental human rights obligations? In the light of the question from the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and, crucially, the decision of Mr Justice Sheldon last week, all we need to do is to ensure that appropriate mental health provision is made for any offender, particularly those who are isolated for long periods in the day. I know my noble friend is an expert in these matters.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. We are carefully considering the High Court ruling on the Abu case, including considering appealing the decision. Our decisions are based on risk, and the proportionality of our response to that risk is how we make our decisions. Someone’s mental health throughout the justice system is a very important factor in how we manage everyone’s risk, whether they are on the first night of their first time in prison or they have been in the system for a very long time.

I am proud of so many of my colleagues who spend so much of their time in our prisons, and of our probation staff, who go out of their way to support people with their mental health requirements. The support we give our NHS and health providers in our prisons is clearly important too. We need to enable them to have the right space and time to work with people who are often very vulnerable.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, there is a gaslighting quality about the High Court judgment that the public sector equality duty was breached because no consideration had been given to decisions that meant a cohort of prisoners, all Muslim, were treated in a particular way. The judge said that this could have been perceived as a form of collective punishment against Muslims. All the inmates in the separation centre are Muslims. Some 75% of MI5’s counterterrorist caseload is Islamist extremists, and 63% of prisoners for terrorism-related offences are Muslims. When I visited HMP Frankland in 2022, a prison officer in the separation unit told me that they were perpetually—and, I thought, dangerously—constrained by the PSED and human rights legislation. Will the Government appeal this judgment and strenuously reassure prison governors that they can and must continue to use separation units to keep officers, prisoners and the public safe?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

As I said to my noble friend, we are considering appealing the decision. It is also important that the staff who work in our separation centres have the skills they need to care for the people there. The system is robust, but we always need to look for improvements. That is why we commissioned Mr Hall to look at all our separation centres and the policies we have to make sure they are right for the future.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister think that we are doing enough to keep our prison staff safe? With increasingly violent prisoners challenging authority, what else is being done?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

My noble friend is right to raise this question. One of the things that surprises me going round prisons now compared with 25 years ago is how much more violence there is on our wings. That is probably due to a combination of the amount of drugs in our prisons and the number of people with severe mental health issues, but also people serving very long sentences.

We are investing in protecting our staff. As my noble friend said, our staff do an amazing job, often in very difficult and dangerous situations. That is why we have invested £15 million in 10,000 personal body armour jackets and suits. We are also training 500 staff in how to use Tasers. Every other week, I speak to prison leaders. Last week, I spoke to the governors of the long-term high-security estate, who told me how much reassurance the staff have had from the fact they are now getting investment in this extra protection.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

Does the Prison Service have sufficient resources for the mental health issues it has to deal with?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I am not an expert in healthcare, but I am an expert in prisons. I see prisoners getting incredible levels of support, often in regimes that are running hot. My personal assessment is that prisoners are getting very good care within a system that is struggling, so we need to make sure that we have a much more stable prison environment. That is why it is very difficult to run everything, to get people out of their cells and to give people the support that they need when we literally have no space left.

It is also important to have the right facilities. The medical facilities in some of the new prisons we have built that I have seen are excellent and appropriate. We are dealing with people who are often very ill. The life expectancy of someone in a prison is much lower on average than someone who has not been to prison. We need to do all we can to support people with their mental health and other health issues.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister spoke about increasing violence in prisons. Is that as true of women’s prisons as it is of men’s prisons?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I do not know the exact facts. I will write to the noble Baroness on the exact details on violence in women’s prisons, but there are two facts that are very worrying: the rate of self-harm in a women’s prison is eight times higher than in a men’s prison, and 60% of women in prison have brain damage as a result of being hit. We are dealing with some people with severe illnesses and we need to support them.