21
Examination of witnesses
Andrew Neilson and Sinead MacCann.
Q22 The Chair: Welcome to this second evidence session of our inquiry into fire in prisons, and we are delighted to have two witnesses from the Howard League. Before we kick off, I should be grateful if you could both introduce yourselves.
Andrew Neilson: I am director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform.
Sinead MacCann: I am managing solicitor at the Howard League.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed for coming. As I will say at the end, if there is anything you had hoped you would say but there was not time, please feel free to contact us afterwards. We will start our inquiry questions with Lord Bach.
Q23 Lord Bach: Good morning, both of you, and welcome. Mine is a general question but perhaps an important one. How would you describe the current level of fire safety risk across the prison estate? Please decide who wants to answer first, and I look forward to your answers.
Sinead MacCann: Prison settings are inherently high risk because people who live there cannot self-evacuate in the event of a fire. They are reliant on staff becoming aware that there has been a fire and getting people out of their cells. The committee will be aware that the number of fires in prisons is high. In 2025, there were around 2,500 cell fires. That is, on average, about seven fires per day. The rate of injuries is also high. The CPFSI, which regulates, in its most recent annual report reported that 18% of fires had resulted in injuries, which was a drop from the previous year but is still concerningly high. There have been at least 10 fire-related deaths in the past 15 years, including two in 2025. From the Howard League’s perspective, early fire detection, adequate smoke-control systems, adequate suppression systems and effective staff training are all critical to protect people who are held in those establishments and staff who are working there. It is our understanding that, as of April this year, two-thirds of publicly run prisons still had outstanding fire safety works, and that is obviously of great concern.
Lord Bach: Is there anything you would like to add?
Andrew Neilson: No.
The Chair: Before we move on, my understanding is that more fires occur at night rather than during the day. Is that your understanding?
Sinead MacCann: I believe that is correct, yes.
The Chair: What would you say about staffing levels in prisons at night?
Sinead MacCann: Staffing of prisons at night, as I understand it, is lower.
The Chair: Sorry?
Sinead MacCann: There are fewer staff on at night.
The Chair: Is there an issue there in relation to the number of staff available in prisons at night, when, as far as you and we understand, there are more fires? Is that an issue for fire safety?
Andrew Neilson: Staff at night have less to do than staff during the day, so it probably balances out. When you have less staff on site, in the end, they are primarily there to respond to things that happen in the night, such as fire bells going off. It does not necessarily mean that the preponderance of incidents happening at night and the lower levels of staff are an issue.
The Chair: Okay. We want to come on later to other staffing issues but, for the time being, that is helpful.
Q24 Lord Moraes: Good morning. You have begun to answer this question already and we put it to the senior officials last week. We want your view on how effective you think current fire detection and suppression technologies currently used in prisons are. What would you like to see being used if they are not adequate?
Sinead MacCann: Perhaps I may start with fire detection. It is accepted by the Government that domestic or stand-alone smoke detectors are insufficient and that automatic fire detection, AFD, is required. That was decided 20 years ago. When the fire safety order came in, the Government accepted that AFD was required. We heard from HMPPS last week that 19,000 prison places still do not have AFD. We understand that other technology is being trialled. Integrated smoke detectors are being trialled, and we understand that they may offer some improvement to DSDs but are not an adequate alternative to AFD. The Howard League is also concerned that alongside the use of DSDs there is reliance on the cell bell system, which is fragile. It relies on people pressing their cell bells, or those in surrounding cells doing so. There is also a five-minute response time to that cell bell, which, given that injury can occur within six minutes of a fire starting, is of some concern. We understand from the CPFSI that there has been a move by the Government to this AFD-only approach and the CPFSI has long recommended that. In January this year, the Howard League was told that that was not going to be the approach that the Government took, but by March there had been a change of approach. We suspect it is in part because of the threat of litigation by the Howard League, but it also followed the inquest into the death of Clare Dupree. The Howard League welcomes the AFD approach. Perhaps we will come to it later but we should like further clarity about the timeframes within which that will be done.
Perhaps I may turn briefly to fire suppression and smoke control systems. Less has been said about those. The focus has been on AFD and the number of prison places that require it but that is only one aspect of the work. It is the most important aspect because no action can be taken to prevent injury or preserve life if staff do not know that a fire has happened. But we did not hear from HMPPS last week about how many prisons require fire suppression and smoke control systems, or the timeframe for installing them. We understand that a significant number of prisons require AFD but may also require smoke control or suppression systems.
Finally, the Government record how they prioritise their work in a fire safety improvement list—the FSIL, which was mentioned last week. It is not a publicly available document but the committee may wish to see it in order to understand how works are being prioritised.
Lord Moraes: I have a quick supplementary question. The Chair started talking about staff at night. Do you think that there are enough staff available to manage fires generally?
Andrew Neilson: I will take that question as I spoke about staff a moment ago. The last quarterly workforce data, which runs from March 2025 to March 2026, showed a drop of 732 officers on the previous year. Leaving rates for staff have dropped slightly. There has been quite a lot of concern around retention, but it is still the case that almost one in 10 prison officers will leave the job in the course of a year, and many of those—around two-thirds—are resignations. There are chronic staffing issues.
There are two ways of looking at this. Obviously, there is the direct management of fire safety. Then there is the more holistic, wider picture. We cannot comment on whether there are enough staff to manage fire safety incidents but, obviously, staff shortages cannot help with something as simple as the response rate to a cell bell going off because of a fire. So we have concerns around staff shortages affecting responses in a timely fashion.
However, our broader concern is the one that we have more confidence in expressing: understaffing in our prison system leads to poor regimes. We know that poor regimes and a lack of meaningful contact with staff or other people in prison lead to individuals spending large spells of their day lying on a bunk in their cells doing nothing. I refer the committee to the annual report of the independent monitoring boards, which was published recently, to give you a flavour of how dire that means things are.
Why is that so important? It creates frustration. It exacerbates poor mental health, which we know—from what little academic research has been done in this area—is associated with people starting cell fires more often than not.
Q25 Lord Hogan-Howe: I have one main point. The 10% staff turnover rate is not very high if you include retirements, to be fair, but I do agree that there was a lack of precision when we talked to people from the Ministry of Justice last week about when they are going to remedy the AFD position. There was a long list of problems and lots of describing the timescale, but there were no milestones.
One thing that I thought we established with them was that, at the moment, there is no process exercising the removal of people from a wing. Obviously, they are doing it quite often because there are quite a few fires, but that will not be the case everywhere. I wonder: have you established a view on whether exercising the removal of people from cells, et cetera, when a fire alarm goes off should happen or is happening? For me, that is worrying. They have not tried it, difficult as it is; I accept that it is not easy.
Sinead MacCann: I was surprised by that evidence because, as I understand it, in the Government’s own policy framework, which is published, there is a requirement for annual drills to be carried out. That is what their policy requires so I was surprised last week to hear the evidence that they do not that, that it is not practised and that it does not go beyond training.
Lord Hogan-Howe: That was not mentioned, so perhaps it is something we can get to the bottom of and chase up.
Andrew Neilson: Can I just say something on the retirement point? In the past year, quite a small proportion of the people who left the service did so due to retirement. I am just checking the figures now. Of the 2,312 prison officers who have left in the past 12 months, only 7.9% left through retirement. The vast majority either resigned or were dismissed.
Lord Hogan-Howe: Your numbers said, I thought, that the turnover rate was 10%. What is the compound effect?
Andrew Neilson: Just under one in 10 prison officers.
Lord Hogan-Howe: That is not massive. I am not saying that it is good—a turnover rate of between 8% and 12% is quite healthy for any organisation, actually—but the non-replacement of people is obviously more worrying, if that is your point. I just think that that turnover rate does not sound massive; I would say that 20% is high but 10% is not.
Andrew Neilson: It is against the backdrop of a service that has fewer prison officers now than it did a year ago. It needs as many prison officers as possible.
Lord Hogan-Howe: I agree with your point about the non-replacement of people.
The Chair: Let us remember that we know from our own report that we know that a lot of the people who are leaving will be people who have been there for less than a year.
Andrew Neilson: Well, exactly.
The Chair: So there is a real problem around the levels of expertise building up among staff.
Andrew Neilson: Exactly. I cannot overlay staff experience with the figures I have just talked about, in terms of departures, but we know that, more generally, the average experience of a prison officer now is much lower than it was. Indeed, most of the staff in the system—the vast majority—do not remember prisons during the pandemic, when things were obviously in a lockdown.
The Chair: There are various factors within that. Before we move on, I wish to put something on the record. You, Sinead, referred to 19,000 places, which was in the evidence given last time out. Just so that people are clear, as we understand it, that figure represents 19,000 individual prisoners. Can you confirm that?
Sinead MacCann: Yes.
Q26 The Chair: Thank you. The second thing is that you also referred to the legal action that the Howard League took. Lord Dubs is going to raise some of the issues around that. Just so that I am clear, I would be very grateful if, when you answer him, you could tell him a bit more about the action you took, as well as the response from the Government three months later.
I have one other question in relation to staff. You listened to the evidence last time out from officials from the MoJ and HMPPS. You heard them talk about their confidence in the levels of fire safety training of all staff. Do you share their confidence?
Sinead MacCann: The short answer is no.
The Chair: Just so we are clear, the short answer is no.
Sinead MacCann: The reason for that—I do not think that this came up in last week’s evidence—is that the Government’s policy requires only 80% of daytime staff to be trained in wearing respiratory protective equipment, yet it is a requirement that you wear RPE if you are responding to a cell fire. In effect, the Government’s framework says that not all staff have to be trained; the requirement is for only 80% to be trained. The Howard League is aware of prisons where even that threshold of 80% is not being met.
Let me return briefly to the point about evacuation drills. I am sure that the committee will hear from the CPFSI in due course. In its expectations document, which I am sure we will come on to, it also refers to an annual themed drill. It may be helpful for the committee to ask more about that as well.
The Chair: That is very helpful indeed.
Q27 Lord Hogan-Howe: There are two parts to my question, so I will ask them separately; I hope that that will be helpful. First, how effective are the current inspection and oversight arrangements for fire safety in prisons?
Sinead MacCann: The CPFSI clearly has a vast task. Over the past two years or so, the Howard League has had disclosure of more than 250 informal and formal notices that the CPFSI has served on the Ministry of Justice, HMPPS, various governors and so on. They contain significant detail on issues in around 50 prisons.
As a point on that, the Howard League obtained those notices through freedom of information requests. Those notices are not published. The Howard League thinks that it would be helpful to have those notice published in the same way as enforcement notices against private bodies are published.
The CPFSI recognised in its most recent annual report that the number of buildings it is required to inspect is obviously vast and that it is able to see only a fairly small number of prisons each year. It will no doubt have views on the size of the task, which it will share with the committee, but I guess that we are probably better able to comment on the fact that it is limited as a result of Crown immunity.
Lord Hogan-Howe: Are there any common themes among those notices?
Sinead MacCann: The things we have talked about: the lack of AFD; issues around the lack of smoke control; lack of ventilation; staff training; how the people who are being held in prison understand what they are required to do in the event of a fire; and signage, notices and other things like that. It is quite varied, and it varies between prisons. In some cases, there is a long list of issues within an individual prison.
Lord Hogan-Howe: Okay. Helpfully, the second part of my question is linked to that. Given Crown immunity, what levers can be pulled to ensure that the Government act? You may want to address whether Crown immunity should apply.
Sinead MacCann: If I can start there, I think that we should not assume that Crown immunity is an inevitability. It is a choice for Parliament to make. We have seen it removed from NHS bodies in relation to concerns about health and safety in the early 1990s. Parliament has chosen to apply corporate manslaughter legislation to Crown bodies. There was a Private Member’s Bill before Parliament in the last session to remove Crown immunity for prisons for health and safety purposes, although we understand that it did not progress beyond First Reading.
From the Howard League’s perspective, that is something that needs to be addressed. It is essential. There are “step away” notices, which the committee will have heard about, there are parliamentary committees like this one providing scrutiny, and there is a last resort of litigation. That is not something that the Howard League or other organisations go into lightly, although we have seen it focus the minds of those who are responsible.
Crown immunity is the bar to the Government being required to, and feeling under pressure to, remedy fire safety issues in prison. I can talk in due course about private prisons, where we have seen that happen differently.
Lord Hogan-Howe: A final question from me: given that Crown immunity does apply, what might work better to get enforcement achieved?
Sinead MacCann: It is difficult. The CPFSI has invented this system of “step away” notices but, essentially, as I understand it, “step away” notices are saying—or the regulator is saying—to the Government: “You hold the responsibility. This is not our responsibility as a regulator. This is us putting you on notice that you are responsible.”
There have been eight “step away” notices. I think they are all outstanding, and fire safety works have started in only one or two prisons, so they have limited effect beyond making quite a bold statement about government failure to act. As I said, there is the option of litigation, which the Howard League has pursued, but it is undesirable that that is the way the Government have to be held to account.
Q28 Lord Bach: I would like to press you just a bit. This is clearly not a good position at the moment, particularly in this context. Is there anything that the Howard League can come up with that can somehow get us round this issue, beyond following what happened in the health service some 20 or 30 years ago?
If there really is not anything that can happen now, that leaves a very unsatisfactory situation, does it not? Private prisons can be taken to court, but public prisons cannot be. It has the makings of a scandal. I just wondered how much thinking the Howard League has done about trying to remedy this; it is a pretty serious position, potentially.
Sinead MacCann: I will start with private prisons and the difference that we have seen. As we understand it, many private prisons also did not have automatic fire detection. They were served with enforcement notices, and those notices resulted in the Government finding funding to ensure that those prisons were prioritised. Crown immunity, if it continues, means that that is not an option.
There may be others who can give more expert advice on other mitigations that can be put in place to in the absence of AFD, although it remains our position that AFD is required. In the absence of those things, our focus, I suppose, is on transparency. One significant concern that the Howard League has is that promises are made, and then there is slippage and those promises are then not fulfilled.
To give an example, in case it is helpful, in 2022 the Government said that fire safety works would start at Swaleside prison because Christian Hinkley had died there. The coroner was told that these works would start in 2022. The Howard League was told in January this year that works would start this August. In May this year, we were then told that works will not start until April 2028. It is very difficult.
The Howard League can, of course, ask questions, but it is very difficult given the size of the problem and when there is not sufficient publicly available information from the Government setting out the timeframe for this work to be done. As I said previously, the focus of the evidence last week was just on AFD and the timeframe for that. That was concerning, but it was also concerning that there is not a timeframe for the other works to be done. Doing work as soon as possible is just not good enough.
Andrew Neilson: On the Crown immunity point, I understood that officials were saying last week that there is an issue with prosecuting the state and that is why they would prefer not to go down that route. But the context is that the Government said that they would introduce AFD in prisons 20 years ago, and we still have not completed that task. Within that context, we want to ask the question of whether Crown immunity is right.
The Chair: Pursuing that a bit further, has the Howard League looked at what might be the disbenefits of removing Crown immunity from prisons? Is it very simple? Does it make sense to be doing it in relation to the fire issues that we are looking at? There may be some disbenefits to prisons by getting rid of Crown immunity overall.
Andrew Neilson: Our primary encounter with it has been over this issue so, in a sense, we are pretty new to thinking it through ourselves. Certainly, from the prism of this issue, it does not seem to be working, for the reasons that Sinead has said.
The Chair: Sinead, do you have anything to add?
Sinead MacCann: No, nothing further.
Q29 The Chair: You have referred to a lot of data. At some point it would be enormously helpful if we could have access to as much of that data as possible, please. In relation to the conversation that seems now to be taking place, it is all about AFD but, as you yourself said, there is very little discussion about suppression. Where is the Howard League’s view in relation to whether there should be greater emphasis placed on suppression than currently appears to be the case at HMPPS?
Sinead MacCann: The Howard League can understand why AFD is the focus. Until staff are alerted to the fact that there is a fire, they cannot do anything about it. That is recognised by the CPFSI in its fire safety expectations document and annual report. However, the Howard League wants greater transparency about what other work needs to be done and how that will be done in light of the Government’s change of position, which the CPFSI recommends, to focus only on AFD.
The point to add to that is that it was our understanding, having heard evidence at the inquest into Clare Dupree’s death, that it was expected that this new AFD-only approach would result in AFD being installed in all prisons by the end of next year. That is obviously not going to be the case; only 10,000 prison places will have AFD installed, and there is no clear timeframe for the remainder of the AFD to be done.
So there needs to be transparency and clarity around that. There also needs to be to be clarity around which prisons require smoke control systems, which prisons require fire suppression systems, and how that work will be done in light of the new AFD-only approach.
The Chair: That is very helpful indeed. Thank you very much. Lord Dubs, we move now to your question.
Q30 Lord Dubs: Thank you, and good morning. We were told last week by the Prison Service that it does not expect the programme of fire safety works to be completed until the early 2030s; that overlaps a bit with your answer to the last question. What is the Howard League’s response to the long timeframe that we are talking about, and what timelines and priorities would you like to see implemented?
Sinead MacCann: It is partly a repeat of what I have said. It is appalling that the Government decided 20 years ago that AFD was to be installed and we are now sitting in 2026 with 19,000 prison places—almost a quarter—without AFD. The litigation that the Howard League has initiated has resulted in some movement and some clarity, but not enough clarity about what is going to happen next.
There was a discussion with HMPPS in its evidence last week about the number of places that they have available—that is, the decant places—to allow these works to be done. The committee was told that it was a minimum of 1,500; it is currently 1,800. We were told in correspondence that by the end of the year it would be 3,200. I think it would be helpful for the committee to understand whether that remains the case, because of course that changes the pace at which the work can be done.
Broadly speaking, the Howard League would like a transparent programme of fire safety works to be published in respect of which the Ministry of Justice reports to Parliament, and it is important that this is not limited just to AFD works. In addition to that, and this point was made last week, because of the time that this whole process has taken, some of the fire safety equipment that has already been installed has a shelf life—I think last week HMPPS said that it is 10 to 15 years—so that needs to be built into the programme. The pace of work means that presumably some of the fire safety improvement works that have already been completed will need to be updated at some point, so a transparent programme of works that is published should account for all those things.
Lord Dubs: You mentioned the legal action. Is there anything else you want to add about that?
The Chair: Just for the record, while most of us have read about it, perhaps you could just explain what the Howard League has done and why it did it.
Sinead MacCann: It has been ongoing since the end of last year. As I mentioned earlier, the Howard League had been gathering the fire safety notices that the CPFSI had sent to understand the extent of the problem, which had been ongoing for over a year before the legal action started. Then in October last year we sent pre-action correspondence to the Government about five prisons. Truthfully, we chose those prisons because they were publicly run prisons that had Crown enforcement notices but, in a sense, it could have been any of the prisons that had outstanding fire safety works.
We have been in pre-action correspondence for a number of months, and that has resulted in some movement. For example, we heard from Wetherby young offender institution, which holds children, and it was 30-something on the fire safety improvement list. We have heard that fire safety work is due to start there this month.
We have seen some progress on the prisons that we had written about. We have had disclosure of the fire safety improvement list but have been asked not to publish that. However, the committee may want to ask more about that, because, as I say, it contains lots of helpful information. It is also prompted, we think, in conjunction with Claire Dupree’s inquest and clarification on the AFD-only approach. Obviously, we wrote to you and to other committees about this, and I think it has prompted the Government to be a bit more transparent about what their position is.
Q31 Lord Dubs: My last question is: is the fire safety framework fit for purpose?
Sinead MacCann: As the committee will be aware, the CPFSI recently published a fire safety expectation document, which is a very helpful document because, as it says, it fills in the gap around things that are not addressed in other codes of practice or in the building standards code of practice. Going to your question, it raises concerns in that document in particular about staff instructions in the framework. The CPFSI says that the focus of the framework is on protecting staff from injury in the event of cell fire, but it does not safeguard prisoners so far as is possible. The CPFSI has said that the staff instructions need to be amended, in particular so that there is something around timing. The cell fire response plan must be time-based, which it is not at the moment, and staff should be instructed to open the door to the cell and remove the person who is in there as soon as possible, and that is not currently in the instructions.
It is the Howard League’s position that the Government’s framework must be updated urgently to reflect the concerns that have been raised by the CPFSI. It is also our position that the tenability testing that the Government commissioned in 2005 and 2007 needs to be updated, given that it has been 20 years since that very important testing was done. More broadly, it is not to say that the framework is not fit for purpose, but it goes to the point that was raised, for example, around staff training. The policy says one thing; is that what happens in practice? The policy says that staff should be trained. Is that what is happening in practice? Is the staff training happening, and how is that monitored?
Q32 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: As you will know, the Prisons Minister, Lord Timpson, wrote to this committee and to the Justice Committee in the Commons in March of this year, stating that HMPPS would not meet its commitment to ensure that all prison accommodation is fire safety compliant by the end of 2027. He said that meeting that deadline would take cells out of circulation, which would “inevitably—and significantly—breach critical capacity, resulting in the collapse of the proper functioning of the prison and wider criminal justice system”.
First, do you accept what he said about the consequences of doing that? Secondly, putting yourself in the Minister’s shoes, given that there is limited capacity within the prison estate, what would you have him do more precisely if he cannot free up more cells to enable those works? I appreciate that you say you do not have all the information you need to make positive recommendations in that level of detail but perhaps, if you cannot, you could indicate what precisely are the items of information that you would need in order to answer that question.
Andrew Neilson: You can tell that Sinead is our fire safety expert because I am going to try to answer this question on some of the broader points that I think it raises; others might want to add more specific things. We talked in terms of what could be done. Do I accept the statement the Minister made? Yes; clearly it is difficult for Ministers presiding over a system with very little headroom in it, but that in itself is a political choice, and I will come to that in a moment.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: It is not really a political choice to preside over the collapse of the wider criminal justice system.
Andrew Neilson: More could have been done to create more headroom, which I will talk about. Just in terms of what could be done, we have talked about the importance of recruiting, training and retaining staff, so that is one thing that is pretty key from a preventive point of view, if nothing else. I was saying about how I would argue that a lack of staff and poor regimes lead to probably more cell fires than we would see if people were out of their cells in work, education and training, or whatever the purposeful activity might be during the day. Because we are not seeing that, there are lots of problems in the estate: violence and drugs—and cell fires is another of those issues.
To come to the nub of the question, I was quite struck, as I am sure members of the committee were, with the exchange at the evidence session early on last week around this question of when did officials know that they were not going to meet their target and why did they not make that public a lot sooner. I think it is fair to say that the officials were quite cagey for quite a bit of that session in responding to that.
The context there is very much what was going on in 2024 and early 2025. Political decisions were being made in the department at that point in time which I argue effectively limited HMPPS’s ability to deal with this issue. We had a new Government come in, they had a very large majority, and I think there was a lot of optimism that bold action would be taken to deal with the capacity crisis in prisons that that newly elected Government was facing. It was a problem that the previous Government had struggled to deal with, possibly because they did not have a large majority. I suspect that that optimism extended to the Ministry of Justice and to HMPPS itself.
The Government commissioned a sentencing review. We have seen subsequent legislation passed, but sadly, despite the Government’s claims that they have delivered once-in-a-generation sentencing reform, the reality is that the changes being implemented are enough to buy them a little headroom and time but not enough to meaningfully impact on the overcrowding and the poor standard of regimes that we see. I also suspect that scaling back ambition on fire safety work is part of that picture in parallel. We expect the Sentencing Act to buy a little time. However, the prison population projections of the Ministry of Justice suggest that the capacity crisis will return in a few years. We would argue that the Government should have gone further to reduce pressure on prison population and capacity. For example, the sentencing review made recommendations that the MoJ did not take up; the Minister has decided not to accept them. Those recommendations could be revisited. More could be done to tackle the high levels of people on remand in prison, which is at its highest level in 50 years. We are very concerned that the Government are not doing enough to get people on the abolished IPP sentence out of prison. My point is simply that there are a number of ways in which the Government could be more ambitious in reducing the pressure on the prison population, which we believe would have a beneficial impact on the system in lots of ways—one of which is to help with this issue of fire safety.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: To summarise, I think that the Minister is saying that the only limit on delivery is the capacity issue, and you are saying that in that case the way to get these improvements made to a reasonable timescale is further sentencing reform, releasing more capacity for fire safety improvements.
Andrew Neilson: It is. Some might say that the Government are building all these new prisons and they will all be fire-safe, so why not plough ahead with that rather than spending millions on retrofitting old prisons? But we know from successive Governments doing this that the new prisons will fill up and the old prisons will remain full. The problem that we have is that billions of pounds will be spent on building new prisons rather than perhaps prioritising some of that money to improve the existing prison system, yet the Government cannot even properly staff or properly resource and make fire-safe the prisons that they already have.
The Chair: Again, before we move on, on the issue of overcrowding, which of the unaccepted Gauke recommendations do you think should be considered?
Andrew Neilson: For example, there is the recommendation around earned progression. It was suggested that a form of that could be extended to people on extended determinate sentences; that was not taken up by the Government, but it would have had a beneficial impact. There is an argument that the review itself was not ambitious enough, of course, but within what it said there were recommendations that were politically tenable but were not taken up.
The Chair: That is very helpful.
Q33 Baroness Hughes of Stretford: We are interested in the differences, if any, between public and private prisons in respect of fire safety. In your written submission to us, the Howard League has said that the contrast between public and privately run prisons in England and Wales underlines the insufficiency of the regulatory regime as it stands. Could you unpack what that means and explain it to us more fully?
Sinead MacCann: The key difference is that in private prisons the CPFSI can enforce, and that has had the effect of AFD being installed more quickly. As I mentioned earlier, we understand that all private prisons have AFD, but not all of them had it from the outset. We understand that a series of enforcement notices were sent by the CPFSI to those prisons, and that resulted in resources being found and those prisons being prioritised. It is worth noting that the fire safety improvement list and the correspondence that we have had with Government has been focused on publicly run prisons, so there is less information available to us about them, in large part because they just do not have the same degree of fire safety issues. That is not to say that there are no concerns. For example, that was a death at Oakwood prison, which did have AFD, which goes to the point about this not just being about AFD but also about smoke control, fire suppression, staff training and so on. We understand that there is an ongoing criminal investigation as a result of the death at Oakwood that just would not be possible if it had occurred in a publicly run prison.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: When we look at what we know and what the committee has been told about the situation in private prisons as regards fire safety, it seems a complex picture. I do not know whether you can shed any light on that—on the fact that on the one hand, as you say, they all have AFD installed, and the private prisons do not operate category D or A prisons at the extreme ends of the spectrum, yet they have a disproportionate number of fires relative to the proportion of private prisons. Within that, we understand that nearly half those fires occur in three specific prisons.
First, do you know which prisons they are, and can you tell us? Can you shed any light on that picture? Why do they have a disproportionate number of fires, despite having universal AFD, et cetera? You may have touched on some of the reasons for that. What is going on in those three prisons?
Sinead MacCann: The short answer is I cannot tell you. After this, I can provide the committee with details of which prisons they are, because we have a list of the number of fires in prisons in 2025, broken down by prison. We can give you that afterwards. But it comes back to the point that I made earlier: the problem is that data is just not published, so we do not know why there is a cluster of fire-related incidents in particular prisons, because the reasons why the fires were set, or who set them, or the number of people setting fires, is unpublished. It is something that HMPPS will have to answer.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: That information is not published even in relation to private prisons?
Sinead MacCann: Not as far as I am aware, no. I heard the questions being asked at the evidence session last week, and I have looked back at the CPFSI’s annual reports to see whether it tracked that. I think that the last annual report was the first time that that commentary had been introduced, so I do not know whether the CPFSI may have data that it can share with you, to explain whether it is something unusual in that particular year or a trend that goes back over time.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: That is something that we will ask the CPFSI. It has said so far that the disproportionality in the number of fires relative to the proportion of private prisons should not be overinterpreted, precisely because of this reason that half the fires are clustered in three prisons. Yet there is no further information available to us to try to explain that better.
Q34 The Chair: In the private prison, where action can be taken, because they do not have Crown immunity, who is accountable? Who is held to account?
Sinead MacCann: As I understand it, it is the private company that operates the prison. If we look at the CPFSI’s recently updated expectations document, we can see that it makes clear—in updating guidance published in 2015—that the responsible person for the purpose of the fire safety order is not just the governor or director. The way in which the current framework is written is that there is a focus on the governor. The CPFSI’s guidance makes it clear that it is a responsibility that is shared, because the governor does not have the ability to make decisions around budget and things like that. In the case of public prisons, some of them have private providers that, for example, provide facilities management services. In the case of private prisons, the same will apply. If Serco runs your private prison, Serco will be responsible. The Government still have ultimate responsibility—so the Ministry of Justice and the HMPPS have ultimate responsibility to make funds available for the work to be done. But as I understand it, proceedings will be taken against the private company.
The Chair: Who would the proceedings be brought against in terms of public prisons?
Sinead MacCann: Do you mean for the purpose of the Howard League’s proceedings against the Secretary of State?
The Chair: Yes.
Sinead MacCann: The Secretary of State has ultimate responsibility.
The Chair: Do you have views about the rather difficult position that governors find themselves in? What more could we do to help governors who, as you rightly said, are put in a sense in charge of something where they have relatively little control?
Sinead MacCann: There are some things over which governors have control. There is the day-to-day stuff, such as the accommodation fabric checks, to make sure that things are working on the ground. In terms of the responsibility or the requirement for things such as AFD to be installed, they do not have the ability to do that.
The Chair: Is there anything that you would change, though?
Andrew Neilson: Governor autonomy in the public sector has been a thing which various organisations, including the Howard League, have looked at over the years. We are broadly supportive of that notion, certainly. HMPPS is a centrally run, bureaucratic, “from the centre”, top-down organisation. Governors cannot recruit their own staff, for example. They do not choose the prison officers who come to work for them. We have long thought that that is perhaps not the best way of running a prison, never mind the system as a whole. So, yes, as part of that governor autonomy agenda, you could see more responsibility and budget being given to individual governors.
Why has governor autonomy not happened, despite interest over the years from various Secretaries of State of different parties? When you are presiding over a system in absolute crisis, with the issues we have talked about, it is low on the priority list. It is also a risk, of course. The iron hand of HMPPS has one thing going for it, which is that it has been there, doing what it does, for many years. It is a brave Minister who would say, “Let’s relax that iron hand and break it up”.
The Chair: You certainly share the view of this committee because you have just echoed word for word what our report said on this issue.
The reason why I raise this is because we need to hear from you—you have given it to us, I think—that giving more freedom to governors means that they will also have to take on more responsibility. However, if they are given more freedom in some of these areas, that may help reduce the number of fires—for example, if they had more opportunity to decide on things such as getting people out of their cells for longer periods of time. Would you agree?
Andrew Neilson: Potentially. The biggest barrier is capacity, which we talked about earlier. There is pressure to find cells for people coming to prison from the courts. Ultimately, that challenge is well beyond governor grade, I would say. You can have autonomy but, again, you are never going to be choosing the people you receive as prisoners.
The Chair: Even in overcrowded prisons, we find empty classrooms, for example, that are simply not being used. You would say that that is due to a staff shortage. We would say, “But what if governors had more autonomy on recruitment?” I accept that all of these things are interrelated but, down the line, when it comes to ensuring that staff are trained really well in fire safety, my view—I wonder whether you share it—is certainly that, if governors had more autonomy and took this issue more seriously, that would perhaps be a good thing.
Andrew Neilson: It would definitely be a good thing. I wonder about the vagueness around the question of what fire training staff have, how often it is refreshed, et cetera. I was not clear from the session last week that the officials themselves really knew. I certainly think that, if you devolved that down to governor level, it would be a clearer picture.
The Chair: If you think about the evidence that we have received, six minutes is the maximum time to get somebody out of a cell engulfed in smoke, yet we are saying that officers have to go off and find the appropriate kit before they can go and do anything. The time issue worries me enormously, in terms of how that is all planned and trained for.
Q35 Lord Bach: We have already had some discussion about the CPFSI’s recently updated expectations document; Lord Dubs asked those questions. Is there anything else that you want to say about your assessment, as the Howard League, of that recently updated expectations document? Have you said all that you need to say about that?
Sinead MacCann: I think so. It is a very helpful document. It requires the Government to respond—and urgently—to what is in it.
Lord Bach: Are you expecting the Government to respond to it quickly or not?
Sinead MacCann: Am I expecting the Government to respond? I do not know, but one would hope that they would at least look at their own published framework and the recommendations that have been made by the CPFSI in order to ensure that the two align.
Q36 The Chair: That is helpful. You referred earlier to IMBs. Where do they fit in, in relation to fire safety?
Andrew Neilson: It is up to the IMB, really. The monitoring boards will conduct their regular business in visits to prisons and pick up on the issues that they pick up on. They are lay members. In my experience, fire safety is not usually high up on the list of things that they see because, as we said earlier, fire incidents often happen at night, and IMB members are not going to be doing their rounds in the evening. They might hear about them the next day if they take a special interest.
The National Audit Office’s report pointed out some of the issues around fire safety. Our own work and the work of this committee will help increase the profile of this issue for interested parties, including members of the monitoring boards, but there are so many other issues that they are looking at in prisons. This issue is part of the picture, but the most they can do is help raise concern if a particular institution is not fire safe and they feel that there has been a rash of incidents in the reporting period that they are looking at. That is an opportunity for the monitoring board to write to the Secretary of State and say, “Something should be done”.
The Chair: I understand that the Government are currently reviewing the role of IMBs. Do you think that it would be helpful to have a reference to fire safety in the role of IMBs—that is, have it specifically there so that they do check it from time to time?
Andrew Neilson: It would be helpful. We are concerned about the future of the monitoring boards; as you say, the Government are consulting on their future. Their performance is patchy and it depends on their volunteers from prison to prison—certain monitoring boards are better at picking up on issues than others—but, broadly speaking, they offer a layer of scrutiny that we think it is good to have.
You need only read their annual report, which I mentioned earlier in the session. It would be hard to come away from reading that report thinking that we should not have independent monitoring boards. We have the inspectorate, of course, but its approaches are more formal. That is important, but having the monitoring boards in the prisons all the time, rather than just going on announced or unannounced inspections, is a valuable thing. Mandating some consideration of fire safety would, I think, be a good thing.
Q37 The Chair: Can we turn finally to what causes fire in prisons? Our understanding—correct me if I have got this wrong—is that the vast majority of such fires are started by the prisoners themselves. Just so we are clear, is that your understanding? Do you have any figures that you can share with us?
Sinead MacCann: That is our understanding. The figures given by HMPPS last week were somewhere in the range of 95%; that is our understanding as well.
The Chair: Are you happy with those figures? Even if you are not happy with what HMPPS said about the training of prison officers, do you accept its figures? If the vast majority of fires in prisons are deliberately started by prisoners, what can we do to try to reduce that?
Sinead MacCann: Last week, the focus of HMPPS was on the fire reduction measures that it is taking. There was a discussion about the new, safer vapes and arc fault detection devices. Of course the Howard League welcomes those, but there is also an essential relational aspect to this that is not just about physical measures. HMPPS commissioned some research, which I understand was published last year, that looked at precisely this issue. The committee will not be surprised to hear that people who set fires often suffer from mental health and personality difficulties, and that fire-setting is a response to a crisis.
The Government’s own research recommended that a compassionate response be taken that focused on support and procedural justice, thereby addressing concerns that people had in a timely manner and in a fair way, but also—to the point raised earlier—ensured that people had activities to keep them occupied and were not just sitting in their cells. It comes back to the points that Andrew made about the impact of staffing shortages and overcrowding. The Howard League would say that HMPPS, in its own research, has identified the approach that needs to be taken and goes beyond just physical measures.
Andrew Neilson: I was a little surprised that that research was not referred to by the officials at the session last week, given that the Government themselves commissioned the research. There was a discussion around deterrence and potentially keeping people in prison longer to try to stop them committing fire in cells. That research would suggest that that would not be an effective deterrent.
The Chair: Just to share this with you, one of this committee’s concerns was that whole issue about limited activity and limited support for people with mental health, drug, alcohol or gambling problems—all those issues. That includes skills, job training and all those activities that we think are so important to help reduce reoffending. Yet, despite everything we have heard, one of the prisoners who wrote to us when we did our prisons report wrote to me recently. He analysed every single day for six whole months the time he was in his cell and when he was out of his cell. Over six months, he averaged 2.7 hours a day out of his cell. That was it. Most of that was to go and eat. That is one prisoner, but we know that it is reflected by many others. It seems that the biggest thing we can do to reduce fires is provide support for people with mental ill-health and meaningful activity for prisoners to be doing. That echoes exactly what you have said, but is there anything else that could be done? You are saying sanctions and threats of doubling the length of your sentence and so on do not work. Is there anything else?
Lord Bach: Can I follow on?
The Chair: Yes, please. Although I have Lord Anderson, maybe on the same issue.
Q38 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: On that point, we on the committee are interested to know whether there are lessons to be learned from other countries. The sense we have had from the Ministry of Justice is that we may not have much to learn when it comes to processes for responding to and tackling fires, but I am interested to know whether you are aware of any other countries where there is a substantially lower rate of fires in prisons. Are there any good ideas you might have come across, perhaps at the technical level, to reduce the capability of fire-starting—we have had some successes here with vapes but there may be other lessons—or, perhaps more importantly still, are there other countries that have done a better job of removing or diminishing the reasons why prisoners start fires?
Sinead MacCann: That is not something I am aware of.
Andrew Neilson: We have not looked at international comparisons. That would be difficult because different jurisdictions have different ways in which to collect data. As we know, we have challenges with data here. I can only reiterate that I suspect that if you go to somewhere like Norway, which has a smaller prison population and a higher ratio of staff to people in prison, where the staff have a lot more training, there is a lot more rehabilitation going on and people are not being expected to spend only two to three hours a day out of their cells, then you will get fewer fires.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Is that reflected, for example, in our experience with detention centres, where you have a much higher staff to inmate ratio, more purposeful activity during the day and more time out of cells? Are we looking at relatively low rates of setting fires in those types of institutions?
Andrew Neilson: In immigration detention?
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: I was thinking of the old detention centres for 14 to 17 year-olds, where there is an educational function as much as a prison function—more purposeful activity, better staff to inmate ratios and the sort of things you are saying about Norway. I am just wondering whether that fed through into a lower rate of setting fires.
Andrew Neilson: Not that we are aware of.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: You do not know either way.
Andrew Neilson: We do not.
Q39 Lord Bach: While we are on this subject, can I ask you about the prison estate and the old prison estate, which some of us might have liked to have seen disappear because of what they are like? I can think of individual prisons that we know. It must have a relevance to how much time prisoners spend outside the cells, perhaps depending on the state of the building. Does this have any relevance at all to fires? Are there any statistics or even stories about whether the older prisons, which are going to continue to exist for some time, for reasons that we have heard about a lot, are relevant to this issue?
Andrew Neilson: We can look at the data that Sinead mentioned, which we will share with the committee, on prisons where we are aware of incidents in the last year. We can look at whether there is a preponderance of old Victorian jails in the list. I suspect not, because the issue around staffing and whether there is fire detection is more important than the physical state of the cell. We have to bear in mind, of course, that the older Victorian prisons, particularly the London jails like Pentonville, Wandsworth and the Scrubs, are particularly overcrowded, with a large population. That does not necessarily even tell you whether they have more fire incidents compared to a smaller prison.
Q40 The Chair: Before we come to the end, you talked on a number of occasions about how the key thing that you from the Howard League appear to want is much greater transparency from the Government about what their plans are. Can you tell this committee so that it is on the record—although it is probably bleedingly obvious—why you want that?
Sinead MacCann: The reason why we want it is because it is a scandal that, 20 years after a decision was made that fire safety works would be completed, we are still in a position whereby almost a quarter of prison places have not done that. The Howard League is concerned that, despite our best efforts and the efforts of others, there is still no clarity about what the timeframe is, even when HMPPS appeared in front of the committee last week. People’s lives are at risk as a result of the failure to install AFD in particular, as well as other fire safety measures. Even within the time in which the Howard League has been interested in and working on this issue, there has been significant slippage that makes it almost impossible to understand when we should expect to feel confident that prisons in England and Wales will be fire safe.
The Chair: I do not want to put words into your mouth, but why is that clarity so important?
Andrew Neilson: Particularly given the Crown immunity issue that we talked about earlier, the clarity is partly about asking what tools we have to hold the Government to account for things that they say they will do. That transparency would help. We can say, “You’ve said you will do this by then”.
The Chair: Thank you. It is really important that we hear from you rather than us saying to you that it is the best way we have of holding the Government to account.
Andrew Neilson: Can I also say: why is it a scandal? We know why, but it is not just about the lives that might be lost. It is about what it tells us about the prison system. We have talked about the problems that it faces and that this is a symptom, to some degree, of those problems. This should matter to all of us because the vast majority of people who are living in these cells and setting the fires will be released into the community. If they have not had rehabilitation or that purposeful activity and have been expected to live in mental distress and frustration with nothing to do but set fire to their cells when they get to the breaking point then they will come out into the community and, arguably, be less safe even than they were when they went into prison. That is a damning indictment.
The Chair: A huge thank you, first, for all the work you have done on this already. We are in awe of the work that the Howard League has done on this issue and many others. Secondly, thank you for your open and detailed answers to our questions. Thirdly, thank you in advance for the further information that I know you are going to supply to us, which we hope you will do as quickly as possible. On behalf of the entire committee, thank you very much indeed.
