'No plans' to strip contract for Parc Prison from G4S says UK Government’s Prisons Minister

The UK Government’s Prisons Minister has said he has no plans to strip the contract for running Parc Prison near Bridgend from the security firm G4S.The privately-run prison has been the focus of concerns after the death of 17 inmates over the course of 2024. Not all of the deaths are thought to have been drug-related but eight have been categorised as from ‘non-natural causes.’Senior figures from G4S and the Prison Service have been giving evidence to MPs belonging to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee along with the Prisons Minister, Lord James Timpson. The Labour minister Lord Timpson was asked by the committee’s chair, Ruth Jones, if he agreed with his Conservative predecessor who’d told MPs that there were no plans to cancel G4S’ contract to run Parc.He said he’d been impressed by improvements on a recent visit and wasn’t intending to remove the contract. “I am of the same mind. As I mentioned before. I've seen a number of prisons over the years, both in private ownership and public ownership, and it comes down to leadership and focus and the way that the prison is run over a long period of time. “And despite the challenges, I think they did a lot of good things at HMP Parc, and I think the reasons why you would close on a contracs, they're not the reasons that I saw on my visit.“But we are always keeping a close eye on what is happening in all of our private prisons, and we will hold the team to account whether areas that we are concerned with.”Lord Timpson also admitted that the UK Government has a “long way to go” on tackling drugs in prisons like Parc.“I think we're a long way to go on drugs, a long, long way. I think we need to see it as a public health problem, and I think we need to ensure that when people come in with significant drug problems, there are opportunities for them to turn their lives around. “Substance-free wings, I think are really good way of supporting people, but it's also about getting them to purposeful activity, educating them, getting them in the library, helping to build meaningful relationships with officers and all the other experts who are there to help them. “So I think it's a really big issue, but I also think it's a big opportunity for us, because if we can help people leave prison when they're not getting drugs or alcohol or whatever, all the other issues that they have, it's going to make a massive difference into the amount of reoffending that happens, but I very much see it as a public health issue.”

The Director of HMP Parc, Will Styles, told MPs that security checks on staff have increased five-fold since June but that the vast majority of staff are not corrupt and not the source of drugs. He said that “There are a number of ingress routes for contraband into prisons. It can be thrown over the wall. It can be brought in by visitors secreted in their bodily offices or in children's nappies, etc, when they come to social visits with their loved ones.“Staff corruption is an issue in many prisons, and one of the key ingress routes certainly experienced at Parc are kind of industrial-specification drone drops organised by organised crime gangs, in our case, organised crime gangs, which we think are centred around Wales and the Midlands.”Mr Styles also told MPs that staffing levels had increased as had security checks and he was convinced that Parc is a safe prison.

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