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PRISON GOVERNORS’ ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2025
PRESIDENT’S OPENING ADDRESS
Tom Wheatley
“Leading through crisis: Refreshing the PGA for a stronger future.”
Good morning conference. It’s a privilege to be with you today, the leaders who keep our prisons safe, our staff supported, and our communities protected.
We are pleased to be welcoming Lord Timpson, Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending back to our conference this year. When he spoke to us last year he said
“I want you to judge me on my actions. When I’m back here next year, and the year after that, let’s see where we’ve got to”.
Well, he is back, and I am sure that we can all reflect on what’s changed over the past 12 months. One thing that springs to mind is that although Lord Timpson has returned this year, others that were in the Ministry of Justice and HMPPS Senior Leadership haven’t. Both our previous Lord Chancellor and the Permanent Secretary have moved on to the Home Office and of course the DG CEO Amy Rees and DG Ops Phil Copple have left, or are leaving, the organisation.
Phil and Amy, or Amy and Phil if you prefer, led this organisation through a prolonged capacity crisis, through Governments that didn’t appear to understand the gravity of the issues they faced, or if they did, were unconcerned about the consequences of them. Their joint effort was truly remarkable and as a team they kept the show on the road. To find ourselves heading into a no less uncertain period without their expertise, knowledge and deep understanding of how our prisons operate is a worry. I want to note our thanks to both of them for valuing your voice and working hard to ensure you got the best chance that they could give you to run safe, decent and secure
prisons. As our new DG CEO James McEwan joins us, we hope that he
too will value operational expertise from leaders in both prisons and probation and will take counsel from those that know what it means to do the jobs that you do.
Prison governors carry one of the toughest leadership briefs in public service. You balance security and humanity, logistics and law, risk and rehabilitation—often in the same hour.
I think that the complexity of your role is often underestimated, by the public, by politicians, by our employers and often by ourselves. The best description of our current operating context I have seen was in a written evidence submission to the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee from Dr Kate Gooch, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Bath. I thought that it was worth sharing part of it with you.
“The role of the prison governor is extensive, complex, and diverse…. Over the last 20 years, the role has been fundamentally altered by:
intensive managerialism; chronic underinvestment; the continuing politicisation of prisons (and Ministerial interference with operational decisions); the reconfiguration and hemorrhaging of the workforce; perpetual organisational change and re-structuring; the
centralisation of core functions (e.g. finance, HR, officer recruitment);
and, the privatisation of core services (e.g. prison maintenance, education, healthcare). In addition, the prison population has increased exponentially (primarily due to criminal justice policy, sentencing decisions, court backlogs and the culture regarding recall decisions), the nature of criminal culture and criminality has evolved (including the threat, dynamics and nature of ongoing criminality within prison), and community services have been depleted (with the effect that prisons are often dealing with acute and chronic need)”.
That is a pretty good description of the world in which you are operating. To be able to continue to do so is truly heroic. Looking at you all, my colleagues, makes me very proud to represent you and in awe of what you are able to deliver in the circumstances in which you
find yourselves. Since conference last year, Charlie Taylor and his teams have issued further Urgent Notifications at Winchester and Pentonville, pointing out at Winchester that “poor outcomes we found at Winchester represent systemic failings under the oversight of HMPPS and the Ministry of Justice and will require sustained support and investment if the prison is to provide decent living conditions, improve safety and security, and operate effectively”; and at Pentonville that “The governor will need significant support and investment from HMPPS, including strengthening his senior team, to make measurable improvements in the future”. In his speech to conference last year, Charlie Taylor was candid and direct in his conclusion that these are difficult times for prisons and that being a governor is a tough job.
That’s a point of view that I echo and that should not be forgotten by the leadership of HMPPS, especially those that have never shared your experiences. Since conference last year, the pressures on the estate have been intense. You’ve held the line through capacity emergencies, failing infrastructure, staffing strain, and rapid-fire policy and leadership change. Today, I want to take stock of what has changed since October 2024—because the landscape has shifted.
Capacity
Let’s start with capacity. For many this has become “the only show in town”, pushing other much needed changes down the priority list and dominating the agenda. Last autumn, the estate ran within a hair’s breadth of full. Pressures have eased and tightened in waves since then, but the core picture hasn’t changed enough, and we continue to operate prisons under extreme pressure. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland are in similarly precarious positions in terms of available prison capacity. Risk is being loaded into parts of the estate that are not effectively equipped to deal with it. The remand population remains stubbornly high in England and Wales—a stark proxy for court backlogs and slow case progression.
Reception prisons are choked with remand prisoners, who are often immediately released on sentencing having done all their time on remand. Training prisons are dealing with hugely increased churn as those prisoners that would once have completed short sentences in Reception prisons are moved on to make space. There is very little training that can be delivered to prisoners with days left to serve and the ethos of the training estate can get lost. Open prisons are dealing with a profoundly different risk profile as various schemes that remove proper risk assessment simply to fill every bed impact on populations there. As a friend of mine said to be “You’ll be top and tailing them next”.
This cascades into everything you manage: safer custody, segregation, access to healthcare, legal visits, education timetables, and simply getting people to work, showers and association. When headroom vanishes, discretion vanishes. That’s not sustainable for public protection or staff wellbeing.
Because the system was so tight, emergency tools were repeatedly invoked, which led to rapidly changing policy all of which had to be implemented in your prisons at breakneck speed and with no room for error. That put you and your teams under sustained pressure for much of the last year.
Prison governors are crisis managers in a system stretched to breaking point. These are not long-term levers; they are stopgaps.
Working Hours and Conditions
We recently surveyed our members in relation to their working hours and as you may have anticipated there were very few of our members who could say they were able to complete their work within the hours they are paid for. At one point the flexibility that our members enjoyed meant that being told it was “swings and roundabouts” had some validity. If you needed to work longer hours to get the job done, there was opportunity to get the time back later.
That ship has sailed for many of you. Add to the 48 hours, which was the average that you reported you were at work per week, time spent ‘on call’ and time commuting to and from your place of work and it is no surprise that people are trying to get out of prisons into roles where they have greater autonomy and flexibility. This isn’t what we want to see. We want to see a future where roles in prisons are the ones that people want the most, and where they are appropriately rewarded for what they do. You are the only people working in prisons that do not have any sort of paid overtime or flexitime arrangements.
Sentencing Bill
The past year has brought significant policy movement aimed at stabilising demand for prison places:
The Sentencing Review promised reform. What we got was a rebrand of the status quo. That’s not progress—it’s procrastination. It simply didn’t deliver on its brief to review the framework around longer custodial sentences, including the use of minimum sentences, the range of sentences and maximum penalties available for different offences, and to push back on the “sentence inflation” of the last two decades which has driven the increase in the prison population
across the UK.
The extensively trialled ‘earned progression’ model that the previous Lord Chancellor saw in Texas has metamorphosised into something that looks and sounds very much like what we’ve already got. There
is something that’s fundamentally different in spending more time in
prison for poor behaviour, rather than less time for good behaviour. This feels like an opportunity lost.
The government has accepted, in principle, reforms to replace most short prison terms with tougher, concrete community penalties— with bans, curfews, exclusions and intensive supervision— recognising that very short custody often fuels reoffending and consumes scarce prison headroom. The Sentencing Bill is in train to give courts the tools and the confidence to use those alternatives for suitable cases.
Home Detention Curfew has been extended up to 365 days for eligible prisoners. At the same time, recall policy has been tightened to cap some low-risk, technical-breach recalls at 28 days, to avoid cycling people back into custody where risk can be managed in the community. These are finely balanced public-protection calls, and governors will feel the consequences on both sides of the gate.
These changes won’t transform things overnight—but they are steps to de-pressurise the estate while holding the line on public safety.
Drugs and Drones
The single biggest operational threat you report is the drug economy—now supercharged by synthetic opioids (nitazenes) and drone-enabled supply. In some prisons, over 30% of random drug tests are positive. That’s not just a statistic—it’s a warning light flashing red across the system. The Chief Inspector’s 2024–25 Annual Report was blunt: supply and use of illicit drugs “undermine every aspect of prison life,”. This is simply incompatible with safety, stability and purposeful activity.
We’ve all seen the shift on the supply side: more drones, more sophistication, more third-party orchestration from outside. Inspections and reportage through summer 2025 highlighted how drone deliveries and lucrative markets erode rehabilitation, with purposeful activity rated poor or insufficient across the majority of inspected adult prisons. Your staff cannot run education, a workshop, or a therapeutic community in the middle of a live criminal marketplace.
There are some hopeful indicators. The latest HMPPS Annual Digest shows stepped-up security effort—more random MDTs, and big increases in finds of phones, SIMs and weapons—all of which speak to better searching and intelligence. But the digest also acknowledges testing volumes still aren’t consistently at the levels needed for robust national estimates, so we mustn’t kid ourselves that the data is the whole picture.
Beyond cannabis and synthetic cannabinoids, nitazenes have changed the risk profile. Public health guidance in June 2025 warned of sustained nitazene-linked deaths and urged every area to plan for synthetic opioid risk. That has profound implications for first aid, naloxone coverage, and clinical pathways on reception and throughcare.
Safety
Drugs fuel violence and many of our prisons are unsafe. We have seen the media report horrific acts of violence against prison staff and the number of homicides in our prisons are at an all-time high with 7 homicides in the 12 months to June 2025, an increase from no
homicides in the previous 12 months. As we know that number has increased since the latest statistics were published. What the media report is only the tip of a growing iceberg, only when a notorious prisoner is involved are these events brought into the public eye. You know the true picture and are there every day to pick up the pieces, helping staff and prisoners to cope with both the physical and psychological harm caused, and to try to prevent future harm occurring.
Staff
None of this is solvable without people. You know the story:
experienced officers are gold dust; new officers need time and mentoring; healthcare, education and psychology teams are stretched; and the emotional labour of the job is heavy. The best violence reduction work, the best drug strategy, the best resettlement outcomes—all of it sits on top of stable, skilled, supported staff teams. There is no shortcut around that.
Building a confident, competent workforce is made more difficult when some of the people we have recruited have a limited right to work in the UK and our previous Lord Chancellor’s new department change the rules on Skilled Worker Visas, so that we have to dismiss staff that we have only just recruited and trained. This doesn’t feel like particularly joined-up government.
Regimes
With enough staff, in those prisons where the regime works—proper time out of cell, a credible day’s work, accredited programmes targeted to risk, education that leads somewhere—the atmosphere changes. Disorder and debt shrink. Violence falls. Staff job satisfaction climbs. Yet the inspectorate’s most recent cycle found purposeful activity “poor or insufficient” in a large share of the adult estate inspected. The new PES contracts are seeing a 50% reduction in education provision in some of your prisons. How are you supposed to improve things against that background? How are prisoners supposed to better themselves? How can we break the cycle of reoffending? You feel the tension most keenly: when capacity runs hot, you rob time and resources from the very activity that reduces reoffending. We must stop robbing rehabilitation to pay for overcrowding.
Infrastructure
And the buildings matter. Many of you run Victorian buildings that were never designed for today’s population mix or security threats, and the maintenance backlog has been a long-running constraint. Investment in electronic drone countermeasures, improved windows, and perimeter technology would help; but the National Audit Office has been clear that we need sustained, value-for-money investment and pragmatic choices on where to add places, where to refurbish, and when to close accommodation that can’t be made safe or decent.
Leadership
Leadership in prisons is gritty, not glamorous. You make a thousand micro-judgments, most of which will never be on a minister’s desk or a front page. The system changes only when those micro-judgments add up: the search that finds the parcel; the conversation that defuses the threat of violence; the class that persuades someone to try reading again; the OMU meeting that sets up effective resettlement; the staff rota that keeps an experienced SO on a volatile spur. That is leadership.
We ask prisons to do many things: punish, deter, incapacitate, and rehabilitate. They can never do those things well while running permanently at the red line, with organised criminality driving lucrative drug markets, frayed regimes and exhausted, demoralised, inexperienced staff. The good news is that if the leadership of HMPPS can find a way to free you up to do so and to provide you with the resources that you need, then you—governors—have the know-how to stabilise your jails even in choppy water. Imagine a prison where staff feel safe, prisoners leave with skills, and the public trusts the system again. That’s not a fantasy—it’s a future we can build.
To quote Abraham Lincoln, “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm”.
Thank you for everything you and your teams do, every day, often unseen. I hope that next year, we’ll be talking about predictable regimes, fewer assaults and more people leaving your gates to jobs, homes and families. That isn’t a fantasy. It’s the result of hundreds of practical, professional decisions, made by leaders like you.
Thank you.
