Taxpayers are footing the bill for “eyewatering” and grossly inflated repair costs at prisons across the country as the government scrambles to keep overcrowded jails running after decades of neglect, The Independent can reveal.
Private contracting costs for basic upgrades are “out of control”, the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) has warned, describing the situation as a “public disgrace” that is failing to deliver value for money.
Meanwhile, prison conditions are worse than ever, with a soaring maintenance backlog approaching £2bn, having doubled from 2020 to 2024. Some prisons are so dire that in 2023, a German court refused to extradite a criminal to Britain due to fears over inhumane conditions.
A quarter of prisoners in England and Wales are locked in jails which are not fire safe, while hundreds are held in cells without toilets and forced to defecate in buckets and bags if there aren’t enough staff to let them out to use the toilet overnight.
Labour MP Kim Johnson said: “The taxpayer has been paying twice over: first for underinvestment and bad contracts, then for the premium of reactive maintenance and emergency measures.”
It is feared hundreds of millions have been spent on exorbitant private sector contracts dished out by the Ministry of Justice, whose procurement has been slammed as “reactive and expensive” by the public spending watchdog.
An investigation by The Independent has uncovered tens of millions worth of spiralling costs for simple repairs and evidence of a sector in chaos, including:
- A project to upgrade 50 showers at HMP Wandsworth, estimated to cost £13m. The MoJ later said the price came out lower than forecast at £7.8m (£6.5m plus VAT), the equivalent of £156,000 per shower
- A new £12m healthcare centre not in use three years after its scheduled opening date due to fire door issues, unfinished cabling and problems with an air conditioning unit
- £196m worth of upgrades at HMP Liverpool, HMP Birmingham and HMP Guys Marsh left in limbo after the building firm collapsed
- Temporary boilers in use for seven years at HMP Lincoln, which the prisons inspector warned cost more than a permanent replacement
It comes as it emerged the MoJ has a two-year backlog of unpublished spending transparency data – worth an estimated £11billion of public money, according to analysts Tussell. The MoJ insists all spending is accounted for in annual accounts.
Steve Gillan, general secretary of the POA, said: “If the general public knew the charges for basic things to be done… it’s eyewatering, and at the end of the day, they are the taxpayers paying for it.
“It is not value for money, and it’s an absolute disgrace that taxpayers are footing these bills, which are out of control. No one seems to be very transparent about what’s going on.”
The union, which represents 32,000 prison staff, insists the Conservative government’s decision to privatise all prison maintenance in 2015 was an “utter disaster” as prisons descended into further disrepair.
Basic prison maintenance contracts were awarded to two firms, although one collapsed three years later, while larger upgrade and infrastructure projects are put out to tender.
More than 4,100 cells have been lost to dilapidation since 2010, despite an overcrowding crisis that means every cell is needed.
Offset against the 6,500 new prison places completed by 2024 – way below the government’s target of 20,000 – this means the net number of available cells has only increased by 1,005 places.
The cost per place to protect a cell from being lost to disrepair is between £8,600 and £12,700, the prison service estimates, compared to around £220,000 to build a cell at a new prison. HMP Millsike, a 1,500-cell category C prison in East Yorkshire which opened in March, cost an estimated £400m.
The POA has been lobbying Labour to make good on its manifesto commitment to usher in the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation and bring works back in-house, but fears the government is set to continue the private sector model.
“When you report a problem, it can be anything from six weeks to two months until the very basic stuff is fixed,” Mr Gillan said. “When I used to work on the landing at Chelmsford, you used to phone up the works department, take round a little slip and it would be done the same day.”
Squalid cells
When a local pressure group began to investigate conditions inside overcrowded HMP Wandsworth, which was subject to an urgent notification last year after inspectors found prisoners were spending 22 hours a day in squalid cells, they were met with resistance when they raised questions over the sky-high cost of upgrades.
They also questioned why a newly constructed £12m healthcare centre at the south London Victorian prison was not in use three years after its scheduled opening date of October 2021.
The Independent Monitoring Board had also demanded answers over its opening date in its last two annual reports and criticised the project as a “major failure of procurement” because it has no residential beds, despite “totally inadequate” provision at the prison.
In response to a freedom of information request, the prison service revealed the delays were caused by fire door issues, cabling and telecommunications issues, and problems with the air conditioning unit in the pharmacy. It said the centre, which cost £12.48m (£10.4m plus VAT), was finally in use in March this year.
£156,000 for one shower
It also emerged that a proposed £13m project to upgrade a shower block will replace just 50 showers and take almost five years. This later came out lower than forecast at £7.8m (£6.5m plus VAT), the MoJ said, which is the equivalent of £156,000 per shower.
When the Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign pressed for more information, it was told that the prison services “do not have the capacity to respond to your latest set of questions”.
The letter, dated April 2025, from Ian Blakeman, a director at His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) London, concluded: “We do not consider that there is benefit to HMP Wandsworth or the prisoners detained there in continuing this correspondence.”
Tom Wheatley, the chair of the Prison Governors’ Association, said privatisation has been “incredibly frustrating” for governors who are no longer able to commission repairs.
“When I was first a prison governor, the maintenance staff were employees in my direct management,” he said. “I felt in control of that stuff.”
Abandoned plans
Now, governors are at the mercy of their MoJ landlords, while private contractors charge a premium for the inconvenience of working in a prison environment. Some have got so fed up that they have started their own initiatives, using prisoners to carry out repairs.
When he was running HMP Wakefield from 2018 to 2024, Mr Wheatley was left staggered after learning that replacing a single shower in a supervision unit would cost more than £40,000.
He explained: “Contractors in that environment need to be security cleared to a really high standard.
“We then place lots of restrictions around when they can come in and out, and how long it takes for them to come in and out. They have to be supervised all the time, and then there’s periods of the day where we don’t let them work.
“The contractor then thinks, in order to do this bit of work at the prison, instead of this being a job that’s going to take two blokes two days, it’s now going to take two blokes six days. And during those six days, you are going to have to turn down other work. So that’s why it’s so expensive.”
It also has major implications when private firms go bust. The government was forced to step in and launch a corporate-style Government Facilities Services Limited (GFSL) when the firm tasked with maintaining prisons across southern England, Carillion, failed in 2018.
A £56m scheme to upgrade HMP Liverpool has been left an abandoned building site after contractors ISG collapsed last year. The building firm was one of the government’s biggest contractors for upgrades and prison expansion, leaving many projects in limbo.
Work has only recently resumed with replacement builders at HMP Birmingham, where ISG was refurbishing 300 cells at a cost of £61m, The Independent understands. The full cost to the government of the firm’s collapse is not yet known.
It will also delay efforts to bring 23,000 occupied cells that do not meet fire safety standards up to code by the end of 2027, leaving them at risk of enforcement action by the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate.
Rats and cockroaches
Prisons inspector Charlie Taylor said he regularly sees prisons with costly temporary fixes that are an “enormous” waste of money, while many are held in squalid conditions inside rat- and cockroach-infested jails.
“You often see places with temporary buildings, temporary kitchens,” he told The Independent.
“Very often the prison service is spending more money on hiring kit like generator sets or fridges and things like that than it would by just going out and buying the damn things. That’s just astonishing because it’s an enormous waste of money.”
In a recent inspection of HMP Lincoln, he called for urgent investment to replace the temporary heating system, which was “not fit for purpose”.
He said “long delays” with getting a new boiler meant the prison had relied for seven years on a temporary solution that had cost far more than getting a replacement.
However, in its response, the government said the boiler would not be upgraded until pipe replacement works to tackle the risk from Legionella bacteria had been completed, which could take until 2028. In 2017, an inmate died after contracting legionnaires’ disease at the prison.
‘Something has gone badly wrong’
Ms Johnson, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, is backing the POA’s calls to bring back maintenance in-house. She fears privatisation and neglect have left taxpayers footing the bill for hundreds of millions in avoidable costs.
“It is abundantly clear that the system is not delivering value for money,” she told The Independent. “When basic works like Wandsworth’s £13m shower refurbishment are scheduled to take five years, something has gone badly wrong with scoping, procurement and delivery.
“It is the exact kind of opaque, delay-ridden contracting that breeds mistrust within the system.”
A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) concluded in January that prison funding had failed to keep pace with policy, which has seen more people jailed for longer, leading to “reactive solutions which represent poor value for money”.
This includes a focus on building new places urgently at increased costs and contingency measures, including hiring police cells at nearly five times the average daily cost of a prison place.
HMPPS spent £70m on the emergency measure, known as Operation Safeguard, between February 2023 and September 2024, but cells were only occupied roughly 4 per cent of the time, the report said.
An MoJ spokesperson said: “This government inherited a prison system in crisis – with crumbling infrastructure, dangerous prisons and hard-working staff under immense pressure.
“That is why we are focusing efforts on building 14,000 new prison places – with 2,500 already complete – and have announced a £500m investment into long-term prison and probation maintenance so that we always have the cells we need.
“A 2023 assessment identified that outsourcing prison maintenance contracts to expert private companies would deliver the best value for the taxpayer.”
