Repeat issues with prison’s property handling

Today the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman has published a Learning Lessons Bulletin urging HMPPS to implement policy and operational improvements to help reduce the issues with missing property in prisons.  

In our annual report for 2023 to 2024, we reported that property complaints made up 27% of the complaints we completed. In total we received 1,164 complaints regarding property during this period. I was keen to explore this further and research property handling in prisons as property is consistently the most common complaint category that the PPO investigates.

Click here to read the bulletin

Click here to read the press release

Our research team completed both quantitative and qualitative research over a five-year period (from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2024), during which we received 5,610 property complaints.  

Our key findings include: 

Missing property and transfers Out of the cases where we could determine property went missing, we found that 40% of complaints involved transfers and 89% of these involved a prison-to-prison transfer. We found the number of prison-to-prison transfers was aligned with the number of complaints received by the PPO when grouping prisons by predominant function (excluding the Long Term and High Security Estate) (see figure 4 of our bulletin for more detail).  

Recommendation:  

Enforcing a stricter timeframe for prisons to send property to the receiving prison could encourage property to be sent earlier and reduce the risk of being lost. Receiving prisons should be assigned a timeframe by which prisoners should be informed of the arrival of their property and given the opportunity to collect it.  

Issues with property cards 

There is a statutory requirement to maintain a clear and legible inventory of a prisoner’s property. Our investigations highlighted multiple cases where property cards could not be found.  

Recommendation: 

HMPPS should consider introducing estate-wide digital property cards that are comprehensive and enable a full and accurate audit trail.  

Cell clearances 

Property was commonly reported as lost after staff conducted cell clearances without the prisoner being present.  

The cell clearance certificate must be stored in the prisoner’s core record, however we found that staff often failed to do this.  

Recommendation: 

HMPPS should consider expanding the use of Body Worn Video Cameras (BWVC) to include cell clearances. Retaining the BWVC footage and any relevant CCTV footage could help establish what happened and who had access to a cell. 

Laundry 

4% of all property complaints from our in-depth sample analysis concerned property lost or damaged following it being handed over to the prison laundry.  

Concerningly, several prisons asked prisoners to sign a separate disclaimer agreeing that the prison could not be held responsible for clothing put through laundry.  

Recommendation: 

HMPPS should investigate which prisons are asking prisoners to sign disclaimers for laundry as this breaches national policy. 

The Policy Framework should mandate the requirement for prisons to have audit trails to evidence what property has been handed in and out of laundry to help make it easier to resolve complaints internally. 

Failure to comply with national policy 

Prisons continue to fail to comply with national policy.  Over the past four years, 18% of recommendations made about property complaints were recommending a notice to staff to comply with national policy.  

Recommendation: 

HMPPS should introduce key performance indicators and audits to motivate prisons to improve their property handling practices. 

It seems HMPPS’ Prisoners’ Property Policy Framework that came into effect in September 2022 has not resulted in a reduction of property complaints to the PPO. We found that prisons are insufficiently motivated to improve property practices, and our findings strongly suggest the need for HMPPS to make operational changes.  

By implementing our recommendations, HMPPS would benefit from: 

• a reduction in the amount of time staff spend dealing with property complaints 

• a reduced amount of compensation payments to prisoners 

• reduced tensions between staff and prisoners  

• improved prisoner wellbeing