The Independent Monitoring Board’s (IMB) latest annual report on HMP Wandsworth, covering June 2025 to May 2026, has found that repeated heating and hot water breakdowns left men at the 170-year-old south London jail in “unsafe, overcrowded, unsanitary and squalid” conditions. One failure last November was serious enough to be declared a “loss of service”, with some cells dropping to around 12°C and the prison issuing 1,500 extra coats, 1,000 blankets and 2,000 packs of instant noodles and soup. By January, any hot water outage lasting more than half an hour had to be reported to the national incident team. The Board said the plumbing and heating systems now need replacing outright, not patching.
Overcrowding made conditions harder to manage. The prison’s certified capacity is 963, but it held 1,434 men at the end of the reporting year, most sharing cells built for one. Around a third of staff were unavailable on a typical day, and the resulting shortages meant some men spent up to 22 hours a day locked in their cells, with nearly 40% having no allocated work, education or training. The Howard League had already warned in October 2025 that many cells still lacked working smoke detectors.
There were some signs of progress: self-harm incidents fell by more than a quarter and assaults on staff dropped by over a third, which the Board linked partly to a new healthcare unit and a small pilot wing run on Scandinavian principles. For prisoners and their families, though, the report is a reminder that improvements at Wandsworth remain fragile, and that basic living conditions – heat, hot water and time out of cell – are still not guaranteed.