Exposed: The staggering £16.2 million expenditure on taxis and hotel accommodations to transport prison staff across the country to fill staffing shortages

Swaleside – where 14 inmates have died in just two years – borrowed an average of 45 officers a month in 2023, new figures show. Despite receiving 44 officers a month, Woodhill still faced a 36 per cent shortfall and had the highest self-harm rate of any prison, while frustrations exacerbated by temporary staff arrangements were reported to be fuelling violence among inmates. 

Long Lartin – which houses some of the country’s highest-risk offenders, and suffers among the worst rates of assaults on staff – topped the list, relying on an average of 58 borrowed staff each month.

Each of the four prisons issued with emergency warnings in the past year – Bedford, Bristol, Woodhill and Cookham Wood – were among those which required temporary staff.

This increasing reliance on the decades-old practice of detached duty is merely “papering over the cracks” at an “enormous cost” to the taxpayer, said Mr Taylor, warning that “while there are many brilliant officers working on detached duty, those staff won’t remain in the prison in the longer term”.

“That’s a challenge for governors because it means constantly training new arrivals to the particular issues within your jail, but it also means they can’t build up the kind of stable culture that we know encourages safer, more productive regimes that make people less likely to re-offend on release.”

It can also be destabilising for prisons to lose officers to detached duty. Independent Monitoring Boards have warned the “over-recruitment” of officers in order to allow more to be sent on detached duty is having adverse effects in at least three Yorkshire prisons, one in Stafford and another in Shropshire.

In HMP Wakefield, managers were overstretched by having to train new recruits left to run the prison without more experienced colleagues who had been sent on detached duty. In HMP Wealstun, this was causing similar shortages, leading to inmates being locked in their cells for up to 22 hours a day.

Two-thirds of the 52 jails which sent officers in November were in the north or Midlands, analysis by The Independent found.

When there are not enough staff willing to volunteer for detached duty, some governors are now being forced to use a rotational system where officers are sent on compulsory two-week stretches, said Tom Wheatley, who governed Wakefield until becoming chief of the Prison Governors Association in March.

This has been the case for around eight months, Mr Wheatley believes and can cause a “knock-on effect” in which – as an example – staff at Wakefield have to be sent on a daily basis to cover for officers at Leeds who have volunteered to be sent on detached duty in Kent for a longer period.

“It’s a really complicated, labour-intensive and expensive way – but it’s the only way we’ve currently got until we solve the problem”, said Mr Wheatley, who suggested introducing a system of locality pay to help entice people to join southern prisons struggling to recruit and retain new officers.

Detached duty ‘is not a sustainable long-term answer, warns Charlie Taylor (Getty)

While officer starting pay has increased from £23,529 to £32,851 since 2019, this has come at the expense of decent pay increases for serving officers, which is harming staff retention, said Mr Wheatley, who noted that some staff in Kent, for example, are transferring to less violent Border Force roles.

Meanwhile, detached duty costs more than the starting pay for a senior officer. As of February, officers were paid a bonus of £500 for four weeks of detached duty, rising to £2,000 for 12 weeks, in addition to reimbursing 45p per mile of travel costs, accommodation and a subsistence allowance of £25 per night.

Calling for a “complete shake up of recruitment” and a new strategy to stem the “major problem” of officers leaving the service, Tory justice committee chair Bob Neill said there was a “growing case for regional pay arrangements” because “governors need to be able to match local job market conditions”.

Ms Cadbury, Labour’s shadow prisons minister, said the new figures illustrated “how the Conservatives’ mismanagement of our prisons is leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill”.

“The government have already spent nearly £50m to rent police cells – now it’s revealed they’re spending millions sending prison officers across the country to plug in the gaps of staff shortages. 14 years of Conservative government has left our prisons in a state of crisis.”

A prison service spokesperson said: “We make no apologies for ensuring that prisons are adequately staffed across the country – including areas where recruitment has been challenging.

“Detached duty helps us run safe prisons by quickly deploying staff to where they’re needed most. Our successful recruitment campaign means we have 4,900 more officers than in 2017 and retention rates are also improving.”