Each year HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) publishes an Annual Report summing up everything its inspectors found over the previous 12 months, across every prison, young offender institution, secure training centre and immigration removal centre in England and Wales. The full report runs to well over a hundred pages, so below we’ve gone through the Chief Inspector’s own introduction in detail – covering all of its main themes, not just a headline or two – so you get a proper sense of what the year’s inspections actually found. If you want the Chief Inspector’s exact words, the full report is linked at the bottom of this page.
This is Charlie Taylor’s sixth and final Annual Report as Chief Inspector, having taken up the post during the Covid-19 pandemic. He opens by crediting his predecessor and the inspectorate team for getting inspections back up and running by April 2020, before setting out what five-plus years of inspections have told him about the state of the system he’s leaving behind.
Time out of cell. Five years on from the pandemic, recovery is still incomplete: 34% of men and 15% of women reported spending more than 22 hours a day locked up on weekdays. Taylor notes this is the same core complaint inspectors have been making since 1982 – that too little is done to give prisoners anything meaningful to occupy their time.
The long-term high-security estate. Inspections at Swaleside, Wakefield, Whitemoor, Lowdham Grange and Woodhill found “appalling” levels of time out of cell and little chance for prisoners serving long sentences to do anything that might reduce their risk or help them progress. Reports on Manchester, Isle of Wight and Long Lartin (published after the year covered by this report) show the same pattern. At Swaleside and Wakefield, 75% of men said they felt unsafe – violence in these prisons is closely tied to the illicit economy inside them.
Drones, drugs and organised crime. Criminal gangs have industrialised the supply of contraband using drones, which now bring in not just spice, ketamine and cocaine but also lifestyle drugs like Ozempic and Minoxidil, anabolic steroids, phones and chargers. Taylor says these gangs operate “with impunity” inside some prisons, exploiting prisoners with addictions or mental illness, while families outside are “often having to pay off substantial debts to prevent their son or partner from being assaulted.” He’s blunt that this amounts to a national security problem the government isn’t tackling properly – and it’s why he issued urgent notifications for Swaleside, Woodhill and Pentonville this year, all on safety grounds. He’s also critical of Incentivised Substance Free Living wings, which in some prisons are overrun by drugs, and in others have become a refuge for the organised crime members causing the chaos elsewhere on the wings.
Education and training. Taylor is openly frustrated that prison leaders haven’t matched his own emphasis on education as a route to reducing reoffending. He describes “brutal” cuts and redundancies leaving education and training inadequate in most prisons, with absurdly short working days – some workshops close before Friday lunchtime, extending the weekend lock-up even further. On a more positive note, his thematic review “Reading for Rehabilitation” (January 2026) found genuinely excellent practice in some prisons, embedding reading into everyday culture – but he says this remains the exception, and prisoners with the greatest need for help with literacy are too often overlooked.
Relationships still matter most. A joint inspection of Magilligan (with Northern Ireland’s own inspectorate) is held up as a model – excellent staff-prisoner relationships and time out of cell “among the best that inspectors had seen in recent years,” proof that good outcomes are still achievable.
Buildings and bureaucracy. The report catalogues basic maintenance and procurement failures: Lincoln waited seven years for replacement boilers, renting temporary units in the meantime; a crane sat unused at Birmingham; and Manchester faced lengthy delays getting permission to fit windows designed to stop drones getting drugs in. Taylor also criticises the bureaucratic burden on governors, who spend disproportionate time on HR processes and need senior sign-off for spending over £500 – a “ludicrous” rule that gets in the way of leadership, especially for newer governors, alongside slow staff vetting that leaves already understaffed prisons waiting even longer to recruit.
Resettlement and release. Too many prisoners are still released homeless, undermining everything else done to prepare them for release, and Taylor says too few prisons make creative use of family contact to build the stability that helps someone stay out on release.
Women and young people. In the women’s estate, some strong leadership has improved support for vulnerable women, but self-harm remains “staggeringly high” and education has also been cut back; Taylor wants family contact given the same priority as in the best men’s prisons. In youth custody, the picture outside Parc YOI is “too much too violent,” with keep-apart restrictions still damaging regimes, poor time out of cell and weak education despite youth custody being the best-funded and most heavily staffed part of the system. He questions why Parc manages lower violence through relationships and culture rather than the PAVA spray introduced elsewhere as an enforcement tool. A serious safeguarding failure at Oakhill Secure Training Centre led to a further urgent notification.
Immigration detention and court custody. By contrast, this is a more positive area: treatment in immigration removal centres has “generally been decent,” with real improvement seen at Harmondsworth and impressive standards at Dungavel and Derwentside, and deportation flights maintaining decent standards of treatment. Court custody inspections also found improved joint working between agencies and consistently good staff care, even where the buildings themselves remain grim.
A narrow window, and a warning. Recent sentencing changes have reduced the prison population, and the latest quarterly statistics show assaults falling along with some improving inspection scores – a real opportunity, in Taylor’s view, to fix things properly before numbers rise again. But he’s critical that the government’s “frantic response” to last year’s prison capacity crisis focused on emergency releases rather than on the rehabilitation that would reduce the numbers coming to prison in the first place. He points to prisons doing it well under strong leadership – Rye Hill, Doncaster, Hatfield, Northumberland, Huntercombe, Send, Haverigg, Warren Hill and Lincoln among them – as proof of what’s possible, but says HMPPS has never seriously tried to understand why these prisons succeed and copy it elsewhere, particularly the greater autonomy given to directors of privately run prisons. His conclusion is uncomfortable: the prison service is “more comfortable managing a crisis… than it is on relentlessly improving standards.” He also notes that governors move on quickly – unlike headteachers, only around a dozen have stayed in the same job since he took up his post in 2020, which makes sustained improvement harder.
Value for money. At a cost of around £59,000 a year for every prison place, Taylor argues taxpayers deserve better – and that the prisons getting it right show what that money can achieve when it’s spent on clear boundaries, real incentives to change behaviour, work and training, drug recovery that actually works, and keeping family ties alive. He closes by paying tribute to prison staff for the courage he says they show every day, and calls for politicians and HMPPS in Whitehall to show the same courage in clearing the barriers that stand in the way of real change – along with thanks to prison, court and immigration centre staff for their engagement over his five years in post, to the thousands of prisoners who took part in inspections, and to his own inspectorate team, who he says will continue to thrive under his successor.
If you want to read the full reports, follow the links below – we keep the last three years available here:
| Read the 2025-26 Annual Report (4.3 MB) | Read the 2024-25 Annual Report |
| Read the 2023-24 Annual Report | |