The prison was given an Independent Review of Progress in January 2026, the full report can be read on the HM Inspectorate of Prisons website, just follow the links below. In their latest report the inspectors said:
HMP & YOI Parc is a category C resettlement prison in Bridgend, South Wales, run by G4S on behalf of HM Prison and Probation Service, holding around 1,700 men and young offenders against an operational capacity of 1,788. A full inspection in January 2025 found performance had worsened across the board, rating safety Poor, a decline from reasonably good, and respect, purposeful activity and preparation for release all declining to not sufficiently good. This Independent Review of Progress, carried out in January 2026, checks progress against the concerns raised then rather than re-scoring the four healthy prison tests.
Inspectors found good progress on tackling illicit drugs, with the positive drug test rate falling from 31% to 24% over six months, and Parc now running the second-highest number of drug tests of any prison nationally. Reasonable progress had been made on mental health and substance misuse services, with psychiatry input rising from two sessions a week to twelve and waiting times for assessment cut by fifteen weeks, and on some Ofsted-led education concerns. Violence showed a steady downward trend in the final three months before the review, and there had been no self-inflicted deaths since the current director took over.
Inspectors nonetheless found insufficient progress on seven of the eleven priority concerns, including persistently high levels of violence, which had risen 25% over the same period the year before, and self-harm, which remained the second-highest rate among category C prisons. Only six hospital escorts were available daily, over 100 dental appointments were lost to non-attendance in a single month, and some prisoners had gone months, or since arrival, without any contact from an offender manager. Staffing shortages and vetting delays continued to curtail the regime and were described as a major driver of self-harm.
Charlie Taylor
HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
January 2026
To read the full reports, go to the HM Inspectorate of Prisons website or follow the links below:
| Independent Review of Progress report, HM Inspectorate of Prisons review of progress at HMP & YOI Parc (5–7 January 2026, published 16 February 2026) | Inspection report (PDF), Report on an unannounced inspection of HMP & YOI Parc by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (6–17 January 2025, published 23 April 2025) |
| Easy read summary of the 2025 inspection report | |