Ian Acheson: Jenrick should make fixing the shocking treatment of prison officers a Conservative priority

Professor Ian Acheson is Senior Adviser to the Counter Extremism Project.

When I’m speaking to people who know nothing about prisons, I often start with an entertaining mind game.

I ask people to imagine that they are on the board of a company with a turnover north of £6bn a year. The company makes widgets. The widgets have a failure rate of 56 per cent after 12 months. What would you do?

‘Sack the management’ is the predictable and not unreasonable cry in response. Well you can’t, I tell them. I’ve just described His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. The widgets are the offenders, and the failure rate is the number of male adults who reoffend after a year or less inside.

Why this organisation fails so badly would take a whole book. So I wrote one. But I want to focus on one issue that is so scandalously bad and so morally awful that there is only one public sector organisation that could conceal it behind the high walls, literal and figurative of our collapsing prisons: staff sickness.

To be precise, the sickness absence rates of front-line prison officers – the people in uniform at the heart of transforming the lives of offenders who work far from the secretive and bureaucratic invisibility of their London Headquarters civilian boss class.

I often speak up about these people because with limited exception, nobody else does. I’d hardly agree with John McDonnell on the time of day normally, but he’s one of the few members of parliament that genuinely cares about these battered public servants.

Reader, I used to be one. In a varied career up the ladders and down the snakes in the state sector, the three years of my life spent in uniform in HMPs Grendon and Durham is what made me. No other job is like it in the scope for changing and even saving lives. Which is precisely why I can’t keep quiet about the shameful sickness rates that are destroying the ability of the service to operate where it really matters.

The conservative instinct should be focused on fixing this problem, not only because its morally right but because of the wasted talent and the public money that must plug the gaps in the ranks.

What is the scale of the predicament? In December 2024 there were just over 23,000 front line prison officers in England and Wales. Each of these took on average 11.7 days off sick. The largest proportion of sickness absence reasons, at 40 per cent, was mental or behavioural – stress, in layman’s terms.

Working in prisons is a uniquely stressful job. Assaults against staff leapt 19 per cent at the last available figures in 2024. There’s now a one in three chance of being assaulted at work. Scars from the job are mental as well as physical; one working week every year for every prison officer, on average, illustrates the psychological toll.

In all, sickness absence which includes injury from assault removed almost 270,000 days of working availability from a service that is often barely able to safely unlock prisoners for an hour a day; nearly 110,000 days of this eye watering total is stress related. Crudely speaking, that is a pay bill of over £18m for no work.

But the cost, human and fiscal, does not stop there. Absent staff must be replaced for prisons to run safely. There are two expensive solutions: overtime, and detached duty, which is when officers are brought in from elsewhere to prop up prisons staggering under the burden of sickness and unfilled vacancies.  I estimate that this additional cost could be as much as £36.8m pounds annually.

Now this is fluff in the back pocket of a prisons and probation service that costs billions a year. But a continuing failure to treat the moral injury of front line staff doing too much with too little in conditions many of us would refuse to work in has big societal consequences.

Unstable prisons, denuded of staff with morale on the floor, are not places where you can expect rehabilitation to take place. Broken staff can’t help fix broken people. Poor pay and soul destroying, unsafe conditions at work mean most leavers through resignation do so less than a year after they start work on the landings. Money down the drain.

While sickness is not the only or even the greatest problem HMPPS faces, it is one that is eminently fixable. Astonishingly, this national law enforcement agency has no staff care and welfare service worth the name. Staff who have suffered trauma are told to rely on a generic employee support helpline, whilst the incident debriefing and care system is run by volunteer colleagues who may themselves be carrying trauma.

I haven’t found a single public sector agency with a less effective welfare service. Stories abound of managers desperate to run regimes at all costs pressurising ill staff to return to duty too early. As an expert witness in many negligence cases featuring staff injury, I have seen this callous dysfunction firsthand.

Imagine then, that the money wasted on papering over the cracks caused by staff sickness absence was invested into creating a national welfare service. Even on a 20 per cent return to work improvement, that could savemns a year and put unstable prisons back on a footing that will be better able to hold prisoners securely and fit them for release. It would also have the byproduct of making a manifestly unattractive job better.

The savings could also be invested in restoring safe environments in our jails. In a tight fiscal environment, the Ministry of Justice is an unprotected department and the Chancellor is looking for running costs cuts of 15 per cent.

It is unlikely that the senior leaders will consider their own bureaucracy as fair game for these cuts – but foisting them on a front line already reeling from safety and sickness crises is hugely dangerous. Incidentally, the sickness absence rate amongst the 5,500 bureaucrats who work away from the coal face doing god knows what? Just 5.9 days per year.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives in opposition have a chance to exercise some humility and exorcise their historic culpability in austerity-era cuts that have helped put us here as every metric of decency and order went into the shredder. The protection and welfare of essential front line staff in law enforcement should be a conservative impulse, along with the cost savings and increased productivity it would bring.

There is room here for new policies and radical thinking on prison officer staff safety and welfare. When I brought these ideas to Labour in opposition, the feeling from the then shadow prisons minister was it wouldn’t pass the Treasury sniff test. But I know Robert Jenrick is interested.

We were the future of law and order once. Now is the time to seize back the ground.