HM Prison Bedford

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have secured this Adjournment debate on conditions at His Majesty’s Prison Bedford. I thank the Commons Library, the Howard League, the Prison Officers Association, the residents living by the prison, the Prison Reform Trust, the independent monitoring board, Victim Support and Charlie Taylor for their helpful information and data, which will inform the debate.

HMP Bedford, which is also a young offenders institution, was inspected on 9 November, and the findings by His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons are shocking—shocking, but not surprising. In 2018, I was granted an urgent question when Bedford Prison was last issued with an urgent notification. The same problems —inexperienced staff, extreme violence, overcrowding, drug use, mouldy and filthy conditions, self-harm, and rat and cockroach infestations—are cited in the last report and the recent report. It is as heartbreaking as it is deeply frustrating to see the degrading and totally unacceptable conditions in which prison officers, staff and residents are expected to live and work.

HMP Bedford continues to have the highest level of violent assaults against staff in adult male prisons in England and Wales. Self-harm and drug use is excessive. I am sorry to say that the amount of force used by staff was also found to be high. Inspectors saw examples of inappropriate and excessive force alongside unprofessional behaviour. Many prisoners are locked in their cells for up to 23 hours a day, and even the minority who are in education or training find that it is often cancelled because there are no staff to cover those services.

I have been told that prisoners sleep with covers over their mouth to stop cockroaches crawling in while they sleep. The inhumane segregation unit, once described as a rat-infested dungeon, was supposed to be shut down years ago, but endless delays to the new unit mean that it is still in use. Will the Minister explain what he believes prisons are for? Locking people away in those conditions does not keep society safe. Where is the rehabilitation in the system?

Who can leave those conditions a better person, or less likely to reoffend? Overcrowded, squalid and unsafe prisons will never help or allow people to turn their lives around and move on from a life of crime and hurting others. According to the report, staff and leaders are doing their best, and the POA has told me that staff at Bedford feel safer now than they did when the last urgent notification was issued. However, while many problems, such as problems with staff retention, inadequate prison capacity, too few and inexperienced staff and too much staff churn at leadership level, are symptomatic of a wider crisis, questions must be asked about why HMP Bedford has not learned the lessons of the past or been able to implement sustainable changes.

As His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons said in his report, many of the issues found at Bedford

“reflect wider problems across the estate.”

HMP Bedford is the fifth prison in a year to receive an urgent notification and the third reception prison. That is a damning indictment of not just the prison system, but the whole British justice system. Prisoners on remand are waiting far too long for trials because of the court backlog, which means that victims are waiting too long and are not getting justice.

In an ideal world, Bedford Prison would have been shut down years ago. It is a Victorian jail in the middle of an urban area and totally unfit for purpose. Residents living by the prison have had to tolerate unacceptable disturbances for years, with intruders breaking and entering gardens to traffic drugs over the walls and regular drone flights delivering contraband. The noise and disturbance from prisoners in solitary confinement cells mean that nearby residential windows are kept closed and some constituents have reported hearing sexual assaults and violence left unchecked. However, because the prison estate is full to the brim, it looks as though a more modern appropriate prison to detain offenders is not an option, even though it should be.

Despite all that, the Government have not improved the conditions, because they cannot or will not tackle the root causes of the persistent issues at HMP Bedford. Currently, 377 male prisoners are on roll, although the “in use certified normal accommodation” number is 229. More than 45%, or 170 men, are awaiting trial. Some reports say that that figure is higher, so I would be grateful if the Minister clarified the number of men currently waiting to be put before a judge or magistrate and how long the average wait is for a trial date.

It is totally unacceptable that prisoners languish on remand for months and even years in an overcrowded prison, all because this Government have decimated the criminal justice system. The Crown court backlog has hit a new record high of more than 65,000 cases and the magistrates court backlog is also rising. Does the Minister agree that his Government’s target of reducing the backlog to 53,000 by March 2025 is very unlikely to be met?

Serious questions are being asked about whether Bedford can remain as a remand prison. Will the Minister consider a complete re-role of the prison? Our prisons are so overcrowded that judges are being asked to delay sentencing convicted criminals. In HMP Bedford, 46 men have been convicted but are awaiting sentencing. How is that delivering justice for victims or perpetrators?

We will no doubt hear about more plans, promises and initiatives to turn the place around, but I have heard them all before. We have had the 10 prisons project and the prison performance support programme, just two years ago, where Bedford Prison was supposedly going to

“benefit from a new intensive support programme to help challenging jails to improve safety and rehabilitation.”

All have failed.

Will the Minister explain why, after years and years of action plans and interventions, the problems at the prison persist? What will his Government do differently this time to resolve the distinctive and systemic failures at HMP Bedford and across the wider prison estate? What will he do to support the governor to manage an overcrowded prison, to implement basic levels of cleanliness and to tackle a toxic culture, where prisoners are locked up for too long in squalor and do not seem to bother trying to keep their surroundings clean?

In 2017, when HMP Liverpool was described as having the “worst living conditions” ever seen by inspectors, the prison was successfully turned around through a significant population reduction. Huge investment and resources were channelled towards the prison. Bedford needs that level of sustainable investment now. In the context of the current capacity crisis, however, will the Minister confirm whether such a decanting measure is even possible? There is absolutely no excuse for any prison not to meet basic standards of decency.

The quality of leadership is vital. Governor Ali Barker has not yet been there a year, and I hope she gets all the resources she requires to achieve the higher standards needed at HMP Bedford. Meanwhile, nearly half of the prison officers working at the prison have less than two years’ experience. Being a prison officer is one of the most challenging of the uniformed professions. What plans do the Government have to support prison officers and tackle the huge lack of experience in the profession? Leadership and experience are key to improving the outcome at HMP Bedford, but leadership in Government also matters. Since the last urgent notification five years ago, there have been 10 changes in Prisons Minister. Amid such chaos and churn, there cannot be a serious plan for reforming the penal system and delivering justice for victims.

The decision to privatise the estates maintenance contracts has had a particularly detrimental impact on older establishments such as Bedford, where the maintenance needs are substantial. Those contracts were poorly funded and understaffed, and basic routine repair and maintenance work has suffered. What plans has the Minister to improve that and, at the very least, demand a better service from those contracts?

Full use of the recently announced measures, including the emergency release scheme and provision to delay the sentencing of individuals on bail, should be made in the Government’s response to the urgent notification. A presumption to suspend short sentences would also relieve pressures on reception prisons once the relevant legislation has been passed and enacted. Those measures are not about being tough on crime, but about implementing a justice system that works for victims—because today, the justice system is failing victims.

As Bedford Prison serves a number of courts, including in Bedford, Luton and London, there is a lot of intake churn. Because Beford hosts a prison, my constituents are too often the victims of reoffending criminals in the area, and many are understandably losing faith in the justice system’s ability to deliver justice to victims of crime, including violent crime.

The thorny question of what sentencing is for was tackled by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which codified for the first time the principles and purposes of sentencing: the punishment of offenders; the reduction of crime, including reduction by deterrence; the reform and rehabilitation of offenders; and the protection of the public. Apart from punishing prisoners—remember that many Bedford inmates have not yet been convicted of a crime—no other remedies in that list are being met.

A report by Victim Support cites a study conducted for the probation service that reveals that 94% of victims of crime said that the most important thing to them was that the offender did not commit the crime again. The same study found that 81% would prefer an offender to receive an effective sentence rather than a harsh one. The first recommendation of the report is:

“Effective rehabilitation has to be at the heart of the prison system.”

The second recommendation says:

“Though victims accept that any reforms have to be cost-effective, if individual sentencing decisions are seen to be motivated by concern for cost more than justice, they will not inspire the support of victims or the general public.”

Victim Support backs the reduction in short-term prison sentences, but wants evidence-based alternatives to stop reoffending put in place before they are abolished. It wants robustly enforced community sentencing to be applied as a meaningful and effective alternative to custodial sentences. It says that if alternatives such as drug or alcohol treatment programmes, or treatment for mental health problems, are ordered, they need to be adequately funded and proven to prevent reoffending.

The conditions at HMP Bedford, and indeed across the prison estate, are not conducive to the rehabilitation of prisoners—far from it. In fact, the recent urgent notification found that the preparation for release was “Not sufficiently good”. What will the Minister propose in his response to His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons that will finally turn Bedford Prison around, so that I am not standing here again next year asking the same questions? Will he find a solution that finally puts victims at the heart of the criminal justice system, a big part of which is to ensure that prisons rehabilitate offenders, rather than create reoffenders and more victims of crime?