Prisons in England and Wales are still failing to provide basic education, work and training, leaving many prisoners locked in cells for most of the day while drugs and violence continue to destabilise the estate, the outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons has warned.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons’ annual report, published yesterday, found that the widespread flow of illicit drugs remains a ‘critical threat’ to prison stability and ‘most significant threat’ to adult male prisons. In inspection reports published between April 2025 and March 2026, 41% of men and 38% of women surveyed said it was ‘easy’ to get drugs in their jails.

Inspectors found basic security failings, including undertrained staff, broken CCTV, and damaged netting, and windows that could be breached. The report said organised crime gangs were able to operate with ‘impunity’, using drones to deliver large packages of drugs, anabolic steroids, and mobile phones to order.

Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, said too little was being done to reduce demand for drugs or to give prisoners meaningful reasons to change their behaviour.

The report also found that five years after the Covid lockdown, time out of cell had still not recovered. In HMIP’s survey, 34% of men and 15% of women reported spending over 22 hours locked up on weekdays, with little to do. Incentives for good behaviour were described as rarely effective, while drug recovery wings were also often ineffective or themselves overrun by drugs.

‘Sadly, this year a lack of regular, purposeful activity for prisoners has been a key factor in a concerning rise in drug use and violence’, Taylor said. ‘At a cost of £59k a year for each prison place the taxpayer has the right to expect more for their money’.

The report further warned that the number of education, work and training places was often ‘far too low’. Even where places existed, attendance, punctuality and teaching quality were frequently poor. Taylor said substantial cuts to education provision and the loss of specialist teaching staff during the year were likely to make the situation worse.

The watchdog also issued four Urgent Notifications during the year, the formal process used when inspectors have immediate and serious concerns about a prison or detention setting. These were issued for HMP Pentonville, HMP Swaleside, HMP Woodhill, and Oakhill Secure Training Centre.

Swaleside received the lowest scores across all four healthy prison tests, with 75% of prisoners saying they had felt unsafe and six men having been assaulted or stabbed on their first night, some within minutes of arrival on the wing. At Pentonville, inspectors found that many prisoners had been illegally held beyond their release date, while Woodhill was issued with its second Urgent Notification in three years after inspectors found high levels of violence, serious assaults on staff, and widespread drug availability. At Oakhill, inspectors warned that children were at risk of harm amidst serious safeguarding failures, such as through the use of inverted wrist holds and children living in ‘dilapidated’ and ‘dirty’ conditions.

The consequences were reflected in rising levels of violence and self-harm. 

The annual report found violence had increased in two-thirds of the men’s prisons inspected, while serious assaults had risen in 40%. Self-harm had also risen in a third of inspected men’s jails, including a 144% increase at HMP Guys Marsh and a doubling at HMP Northumberland.

Inspectors warned that mental health provision was failing to keep pace with the level of need. Prisoners faced long waits for support, while seriously mentally unwell prisoners experienced ‘appalling’ delays in being transferred to secure hospitals, including one patient at HMP Swaleside who waited 711 days.

The problem was particularly acute in women’s prisons, where inspectors found that women with severe mental health needs were still being sent to prison rather than hospital. HMIP said self-harm rates in women’s prisons remained eight times higher than in men’s prisons.

The annual report comes as the government implements the Sentencing Act 2026, with a new release model due to begin in September. Taylor said it was disappointing that the emphasis had been ‘almost entirely’ on prison population management rather than effective rehabilitation.

Taylor continued that recent sentencing changes, which are intended to reduce the number of people sent to prison for short sentences, had given the prison service ‘some much-needed space’, creating a rare opportunity to deliver long-term reform after years of overcrowding. 

He also raised concerns that public protection arrangements and links between prisons and community services were ‘not as good as we would want to see’ ahead of prisoners being released under the new scheme. ‘Now is the time to act and deliver much-needed, long-term change’, he said.

Responding to the report, prisons minister Lord Timpson acknowledged that it raised ‘serious challenges’, but said there were signs of improvement, with 76% of recent prison inspections finding progress. ‘Two years ago, the prison system was on the verge of collapse. Today, we’ve stabilised it, building thousands of prison places, reforming sentencing and investing heavily in security so prisons cut crime and create fewer victims’, he said.

‘There is much more to do, which is why we’ve also asked former Conservative home secretary Amber Rudd to lead an independent review’.