Are our rat-infested prisons doomed always to be a low priority?

Appalling conditions in English and Welsh prisons have been caused by years of underfunding, mismanagement and neglect, according to Elisabeth Davies, the national chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards. Vermin infestations are an “acute issue” across the prison estate, and prisoners have been bitten by rats and venomous spiders.

She says: “Decades of underinvestment in the fabric of the prison estate has eaten away at the infrastructure and equipment of prisons, stripping away much of the estate’s resilience.”

With an echo of Keir Starmer’s warning against “sticking-plaster politics”, she puts pressure on the prime minister in her report, which draws on inspections of prisons across the country: “This report highlights the consequences of underinvestment and sticking-plaster solutions. It should serve as a warning against continuing down these paths.”

Prisons are always going to be a low priority in surveys of public opinion, but crises force governments to act. The current overcrowding and shortage of prison places has forced Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, to activate emergency plans to release some prisoners after they have served 40 per cent of their sentences instead of 50 per cent.

This has drawn attention to the need for more prison places, and the public would reluctantly accept the government spending more of their money to expand capacity. Most people would probably accept, however harsh they think conditions should be, that rats ought not to be part of prison life.

One of Keir Starmer’s first ministerial appointments was to make James Timpson prisons minister in the House of Lords. Timpson was chief executive of the Timpson Group, the shoe repair company that is known for its policy of employing ex-convicts, and a noted prison reformer.

He knows his subject and has valuable experience of the rehabilitation of offenders, so his appointment was widely welcomed. But other ministers have also tried to make the prison regime more humane, with limited success. Michael Gove was a reformer as secretary of state. He made an immediate impact by not being Chris Grayling, his predecessor, who denied prisoners books. But Gove was in post for only 14 months.

After a gap, Rory Stewart, another liberal Tory, became prisons minister at minister of state level. He too was animated by the best intentions of a humane prison system that focused on reducing reoffending, but he lasted only 16 months. If Timpson stays in post for the whole of this parliament, he might have a real chance of breaking the cycle of short-term ministers stop-starting prisons policy.

Rachel Reeves announced higher capital spending across the public sector in her Budget last month. Capital investment in the Ministry of Justice will rise from £1.5bn last year to £1.8bn this year, and £2bn in the next financial year. This amounts to an average increase of 15 per cent a year, adjusted for inflation, over those three years.

This gives the government the chance, at least, of improving the prison estate as well as increasing its capacity.

There is, however, a more fundamental issue with our prison system, which is whether we lock up too many people in the first place. In England and Wales, 143 people per 100,000 are in prison. In the Netherlands it is 65, and in Germany 67. We are not an obviously more violent or crime-ridden society than either of them – which suggests that there are many people in British prisons who need not be there.

Timpson once said he thought one-third of prisoners in Britain should not be behind bars. We should look to the review of sentencing policy being carried out by David Gauke, a third liberal Tory who held ministerial responsibility for prisons (he was justice secretary for 18 months from 2018 to 2019), to propose alternatives to prison for less dangerous offenders.

The one thing that would allow prisons to reduce rat infestations, overcrowding and sewage leaks, to provide humane accommodation and a chance of rehabilitation, would be a substantial reduction in the number of prisoners.