Britain must escape from the prison of foreign labour

It’s hard to know which is a richer vein of stories about the dysfunction of modern Britain — our prisons or our immigration system. The accidental release of Hadush Kebatu, however, gives us a chance to combine the two.

First, the HMPP Annual Digest revealed that accidental releases have increased by 128 per cent in the last year, with some 262 freed in error. The overwhelming majority of these blunders — 233 — occurred in prisons, as was the case with Kebatu. 

What could be causing this increase? The primary problem, which lies at the root of most of the prison system’s problems, is overcrowding. 

The number of prisoners held on remand while awaiting trial has surged to over 17,500, the highest level in half a century and now accounting for one in five of all prisoners. At HMP Chelmsford, the prison Kebatu was released from, prisoners on remand accounted for 70 per cent of inmates — an increase of over 10 per cent in less than two years.

The need to move these detainees frequently to and from court for hearings places additional pressure on prison staff. This challenge is compounded by the fact that many officers are still relatively new to the role and lack substantial experience in handling the complex process of prisoner intake and discharge. As a recent report into Chelmsford found, a “large number of inexperienced officers” were “working on wings where they were supervised by those with only a few years of experience themselves.”

But overcrowding is far from the prison system’s only problem, and Chelmsford is far from the only prison with problems. In July and August, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons conducted its first inspection of HMP Bullingdon, in Bicester, since 2022. That report found that inadequate security was enabling the use of illicit drugs, which led to debt and violence.

The report also detailed significant concern around “the capability and confidence of newly recruited officers”, and introduced extended training, increasing the “shadowing” period in the prison for newly trained officers to five weeks to compensate, alongside mentoring and coaching. “More focus”, the report found, “was needed on improving basic standards on the wings”. 

In a bid to address severe staffing shortages across British jails, the prison service is increasingly turning to foreign nationals

Medication administration on the wings was primarily carried out by pharmacy technicians, supported by health care assistants and, occasionally, nurses. However, prison officers failed to provide any oversight at the medication hatches, resulting in large groups of patients congregating while waiting for their medication. This lack of supervision compromised patient privacy and increased the risk of medicines being diverted to the intra-prison black market. Additionally, staff responsible for teaching entry-level functional skills in English lacked sufficient skills, limiting their ability to effectively support early-stage readers.

The report noted that about 30 per cent of new officers were recruited from overseas. Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, recently tweeted that Bullingdon was, like many other jails, “heavily dependent on prison officers recruited from West Africa.” 

In a bid to address severe staffing shortages across British jails, the prison service is increasingly turning to foreign nationals. David Shipley writes in The Spectator: “It’s not actually clear how many of these officers are currently working in our prisons.” When he requested the information from the Ministry of Justice, they responded that no quality-assured data was available for release. The issue is further complicated by the variety of hiring and visa pathways through which foreign nationals have been employed as prison officers.

However, even in data deserts there can be found oases. According to FOI responses obtained by the Daily Mail, 2,340 foreign nationals have been hired as prison officers over the last three years; that means nearly 20 per cent of all new hires are coming directly from abroad. 

However, since this figure doesn’t include anyone who has switched over from a previous visa, the figure may be higher — as the massive overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in HMPSS application data suggests. Between July 2023 and June 2025, 61.5 per cent of prison officer applications were from ethnic minority backgrounds, whilst in the same period over 50 per cent of prison officer applicants accepting a formal offer were from ethnic minority backgrounds.

The reliance of the prison service of foreign recruits is all the more staggering when we consider that the service was only allowed to recruit staff from abroad from October 2023, when “prison officer” was added to the skilled worker visa list. The following year, the Prison Service went even further, and began sponsoring skilled worker visas.

This new visa route was picked up with enthusiasm in Africa. Tom Wheatley, President of the Prison Governors Association (PGA), told The I that the growing interest from overseas applicants for roles in UK prisons is largely spreading through word of mouth: “It’s become a strategy that’s now being shared online by the Nigerian expat community.” There are even examples of Nigerian TikTokers promoting the route to their followers, and Nigerians alone accounted for over 10 per cent of all staff hired (and nearly 30 per cent of applications) to jails. 

British jails are now so reliant on west African prison officers that Taylor is warning of further collapse in the system. As the minimum salary requirement for foreign skilled workers has risen over the past two years (from £29,000 to £41,700), many prison officers are now in danger of having their visas revoked. Given the “huge number of west African prison officers, on which many prisons are reliant” warned Taylor, their loss would be “enormously damaging”.

“Reports on the quality of these foreign staff”, writes Shipley, “Are varied. I regularly hear stories of officers being hired whose spoken and written English is so limited they are functionally unable to perform much of the job.” The sudden presence of a sizable number of new recruits whose language skills are so poor they cannot perform their job might help explain how accidental releases have spiked. 

Shipley also reports what he kindly calls “cases of extreme culture clash”. He cites the alleged example of a West African officer at Swaleside who is said to have asked during a meeting, “What is the acceptable level of bribe to take in this prison system.” According to Chatham House, Nigeria remains persistently ranked in the highest quartile for global corruption. It is listed among the 40 most corrupt countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index and ranks 35th from the bottom in the World Bank’s assessment of corruption control. Sub-Saharan Africa averaged 33 out of 100 on the 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index, continuing a years-long pattern of weak results.

The prison service faces the same problems, and is seeking the same solutions, as many other of Britain’s public services. Like education and the health service, it is struggling to attract and retain enough staff, and so instead is drifting towards being reliant on immigration. As I warned in CapX last year:

For over a decade, government policy has been to recruit from lower wage economies in order to suppress public sector wages, which helps fuel a recruitment and retention crisis in the sector, which it solves with recruits from even lower wage economies. 

But solving public sector staffing crises via human quantitative easing, rather than addressing the problem of domestic recruitment and retention, comes with huge problems. 

Immigration … provides policymakers with a shield, behind which they can avoid confronting hard decisions

Materially changing the people who work in the system materially changes the system. Not only are there Shipley’s euphemistic “cases of extreme culture clash”, but we cannot ensure the same standards of recruits — for example, research suggests that half of foreign doctors are not fit to practise in the UK. Then, there are attendant costs; the social care system, for example, has been propped up by foreign recruits but these bought a huge number of dependents, who place further strain on public services. 

Using immigration as a form of public sector wage suppression provides policymakers with a shield, behind which they can avoid confronting hard decisions and facing uncomfortable realities in order to ensure public services are not only cost effective, but efficient.

We stand at a fork in the road — we either continue outsourcing our public services to the lowest bidding workforce, or we begin a radical overhaul that starts, first and foremost, with prioritising British staff and British service users.