In one of my favourite Seinfeld episodes, George Costanza is sitting in a New York diner and – this shows how long ago it was – reading his morning paper. Suddenly he folds the paper up, sets it down on the table and looks across to his companion with weary exasperation. Why, he asks, does the high-minded New York Times refuse to accept that China is a turn-off?
Just like George, many readers will at some stage probably have experienced a similar feeling. Perhaps it was about China, but perhaps about something completely different. Call it the “not right now” syndrome. It is the syndrome that recognises that a subject might be important, but reading a lengthy report about it can be another thing altogether.
Journalists know from bitter experience that prisons are often a turn-off as well. Prisons are remote, often unpleasant places. Most people have never been inside one, and are happy to keep it that way. It is important that prisons exist, of course. They do a difficult but necessary job. Hopefully they do it well. In most respects, though, prisons are out of public sight and, as a result, out of public mind.
Until they are not. Today is one of those times when “not right now” no longer cuts it. The reason is the publication this week of a truly devastating report by Anne Owers, the former chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, on the mishandling of prison capacity. The report lays bare the reasons why prisons have become so consistently overcrowded over so many years to the point of frequent near-collapse. But, as it does so, it also makes clear that the underlying cause is neither a surge in human wickedness nor a rise in overzealous sentencing by the courts. Instead, the cause is bad and broken government.
This is why the report, indispensable though it is for understanding the prisons crisis, is also important in a wider sense. It reads like an account of not just a government department on the verge of failure, but a whole nation state.
Owers shows how overcrowding has its roots in a conflicted approach that has been deeply entrenched among generations of politicians. On the one hand, 21st-century governments have all promised more police and tougher sentences. On the other, they have all promised to cut departmental spending, to hold taxes down and to outsource programmes. As there are almost no voters in prisons, the criminal justice system became a prime target for cuts. But the two policies were – and are – contradictory. The upshot was too many prisoners and not enough prisons or cells to house them in.
This reached crisis point under Rishi Sunak’s government in October 2023, when Owers says the criminal justice system was within three days of meltdown. Early release schemes were hurriedly but grudgingly implemented. Many of the same pressures still exist under Labour today. Money is still tight and courts are still busy. The possibility of mass arrests this weekend in response to Palestine Action protests is simply the latest example of the system’s lack of headroom.
Owers has two particular criticisms of systemic government failings. The first is that the response to our prisons crisis between 2022 and 2024 was far too bureaucratic and repetitive. Several committees, often involving the same people, found themselves endlessly having the same discussions without triggering action. The second is that “surviving the day” then became the overriding preoccupation for government. The approach in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which oversees prisons policy, was to manage the crisis, doing “as little as possible as late as possible”.
But there is a third, very important criticism lurking in her account. Ministers were far too slow and unwilling to face the facts. Sometimes this was true even within the MoJ itself, but the main resistance was from the Home Office, the Treasury and 10 Downing Street. The Home Office had an interest in talking tough and, as the former justice secretary Alex Chalk put it this week: “Some home secretaries’ egos will be writing cheques that the MoJ is expected to cash.” The Treasury tried to hold the line against all increased expenditure. No 10 played for time because it feared the political optics of early release schemes. The sum of these actions was government without leadership.
Some of this has changed under Labour. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, did well by commissioning three important independent reports on different aspects of the criminal justice process – Owers on prison capacity, David Gauke on sentencing, and Sir Brian Leveson on the criminal courts’ backlog – all of which (compare and contrast the Covid inquiry) have been briskly completed within a few months, their recommendations mainly accepted. The wider problems in Whitehall, however, remain. Mahmood still has to get all the changes in these reports past the Home Office, the Treasury and No 10, at a time when all three are preoccupied by Reform UK.
Yet crisis processes and pressures are not in any way unique to the MoJ. On the contrary, they can apply across any part of government. Every Whitehall department has its hands tied by Treasury oversight. Think of the way the NHS, and thus the health department for England, moves into surviving-the-day mode as soon as winter looms. There are lessons in the Owers report for areas such as health and social care, welfare, policing, defence and education, as well as justice.
All of this poses a collective challenge for the way that the British state is organised and does its business. It can be addressed, and perhaps answered, with skill and good fortune in one of two ways. One is by ever-more crisis management, in which, as Sam Freedman puts it in his book Failed State, politicians and officials “keep using the machinery we have, making promises they can’t keep, pulling levers that aren’t there, filling newspapers with announcements of actions that never happen”. That approach is broken.
The other approach is for a more draconian reform of priorities. The Owers report depicts a system that does not work. Yesterday’s report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research argued that, in her autumn budget, Rachel Reeves must either cut spending or raise taxes by more than £40bn if she is to balance the books without breaking Labour’s election promises. These are defining reminders of what is now at stake. It is foolish not to recognise that there are no easy choices here. The pitch has not been rolled with the public for change and the chances of success are uncertain. But it is no less foolish not to recognise – right now – that we cannot go on as we are.