Independent monitors have described the prison system as stuck in decline. They say failures keep piling up, the reality falls short of the rhetoric and meaningful change remains out of reach.
The Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) published their 2025 national annual report on 10 June. It covers adult prisons and the youth estate. Boards from across the country describe what they call a consistent and deeply troubling picture. In their view, long-standing failures are growing worse rather than being resolved. Many of the most serious concerns echo those raised in IMB annual reports over the past decade.
Jane Leech MBE led the report as Interim National Chair, drawing on 18 years with the IMBs. It finds that Boards raise the same basic concerns year after year. There is little sign that national pledges and improvement plans lead to lasting change on the ground.
The report says this leaves men, women and children in custody in increasingly unsafe and demoralising conditions. It warns that failures once seen as serious risk becoming normal.
New pressures have also emerged or grown over the past year. In more and more cases, the impact on prisoners was severe enough that Boards did not wait for their annual reports. They raised concerns directly with ministers and officials as events unfolded. That approach follows their statutory duty.
Drugs and decaying buildings
Illicit drugs remained the biggest single source of instability in adult prisons, the report says. They drove debt, violence, intimidation, self-isolation and life-threatening medical emergencies. At HMP High Down, IMB members recorded 13 medical emergencies in one day, mostly linked to drugs. At HMP Manchester, prisoners were reportedly told in advance about a planned drug search of cells.
Even where prisons cut drug levels, Boards often saw debt-related violence and anxiety-driven self-harm rise. Dealers chased the money owed to them, further unsettling regimes.
Crumbling buildings left prisoners in inhumane conditions. At HMP Bullingdon, a persistent and apparently uncontrolled spider problem led to bites serious enough to need hospital treatment. One prisoner was told he could lose his leg. At HMP Isle of Wight, flood water poured down the steps of the segregation unit and flooded the ground floor.
At HMP Garth, a prisoner died in a cell fire after the alarm apparently failed to go off. Boards had serious concerns about fire safety across the estate. These included faulty alarms and poor evacuation plans for people with mobility problems.
Cuts to education and activity left far too many prisoners inactive and in their cells, the report says. Drugs were easy to obtain, and idle prisoners faced the temptation to use them.
Reform groups call for action
Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust, said the report showed the value of independent scrutiny by the IMBs. She said it must be protected. She called the report “a stark indictment not only of the conditions in our prisons, but of a system that has repeatedly failed to act”.
She said IMBs had warned successive ministers and the Prison Service about unsafe, degrading and ineffective conditions. Those warnings had too often gone unheeded, she said. She welcomed the Sentencing Act as recognition that prisons are under intolerable strain. But she said legislation alone could not fix the problems in the report. She urged ministers and prison leaders to act with urgency.
Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the report “lifts the lid on a prison system in turmoil”. She said it showed the gulf between rhetoric in Westminster and reality in overwhelmed and under-resourced jails.
Ms Coomber said the IMBs, the Howard League and others had raised the alarm for years. In her view, successive governments had been too slow to respond. She said they had also added to the sentence inflation that pushed the system to the brink. Reducing the prison population further, she said, “would save lives, protect staff and help more people to move on from crime”.
Several of the prisons named in the report scored poorly on purposeful activity at their last full inspections. Inspectors rated it as poor at HMP High Down in November 2023. They gave the same rating at HMP Garth in November 2024 and at HMP Bullingdon in October 2025.
