Report underlines “urgent need to reduce demand on our critically overburdened prisons”

The Sentencing Act, which received Royal Assent at the end of January, includes important measures to take the pressure off a struggling service. Prisons have been operating under emergency measures, including an early release scheme, since 2024.

The prison population has risen by 94% since 1990 and currently stands at 87,249 people.

The latest edition of the Prison Reform Trust’s flagship Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile paints a bleak picture of the current treatment and conditions within the prison system. It highlights systemic issues of overcrowding and significant performance failings across nearly half of all prisons.

• In 2024–25, almost three quarters of prisons (72%) in England and Wales were overcrowded—a nine percentage point increase on the previous year. Private prisons have seen a 17% increase in their numbers of overcrowded prisoners in the last year. More than 21,600 people—a quarter of the prison population—are held in overcrowded accommodation.
• 49% of prisons were judged to have concerning or seriously concerning performance by HM Prisons and Probation Service (HMPPS), a notable increase from 42% the previous year.
• Inspectors found that almost three in four inspected prisons (74%) were poor or not sufficiently good at providing purposeful activity.
• Inspectors found that safety was not good enough in almost half (44%) of the 31 men’s prisons inspected in 2024–25
• There were seven homicides in prison in 2024 alone—compared with nine in the preceding five years
• Inspectors found that the use of force had increased in over 40% of adult men’s prisons they inspected last year.

The Sentencing Act aims to reduce demand by an estimated 7,500 places through measures like increased use of deferred and suspended sentences, the regularisation of release points on standard determinate sentences, and reforms to recall.

Alongside the act, the government’s prison building program aims to deliver an additional 14,000 places by 2031.

It is hoped that, as the measures in the act are introduced and more capacity comes on stream, it will create the bandwidth for the prison service to focus on much needed improvement.

But even accounting for the impact of the provisions in the legislation, the prison population is still predicted to increase by an additional 2,000 people by 2029.

For while many of the provisions of the act are welcome, it fails to tackle sentence inflation at the serious end of offending as a primary cause of the growing prison population.

A particular point of concern is the exclusion of prisoners serving an Extended Determinate Sentence from the Sentencing Act; this group now accounts for over one in seven of the sentenced prison population and is rapidly growing.

Furthermore, while the act includes welcome measures to increase opportunities for people serving IPP sentences in the community to have their licences terminated, it does nothing to address the injustice faced by just under 1,000 IPP prisoners who have never been released.

The government has accepted it must turn towards the community rather than solely building prisons. Measures in the act to increase the uptake of effective community alternatives should mean few people are sent to prison to serve short sentences, which have among the highest reoffending rates.

But a significant challenge lies in ensuring the probation service is adequately resourced for the additional numbers under community supervision. After a decade of reform struggles, the service is dealing with poor performance, staff shortages, and escalating caseloads.

The number of recalls has risen sharply, reaching over 40,000 in the year to June 2025—a 32% rise on the previous year. While recalls can be necessary, they are often the result of support failures or risk-averse reactions from an under-resourced system.

The government has committed to recruiting an extra 1,300 probation officers and an additional investment of £700m in the service by 2028.