As we walked to one of the wings at HMP Elmley – there was screaming.
Persistent screaming from a prisoner.
He lifted up his top, revealing numerous scars across his body, and shouted: “This is what Elmley does to you! Self harm! This is what Elmley is doing!”
The rate of self harm in the male prison estate across England and Wales rose by 25% in the last year, so this isn’t uncommon. But quite quickly, it offered an evocative snapshot of life inside.
We went through security at about 7.45am on a weekday morning, before heading into a briefing with the governor about what to expect from our day at Elmley, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent.
Just as she said the word “unpredictable”, an alarm went off. The duty governor’s walkie-talkie was buzzing. He left the room.
A member of staff had been violently assaulted during morning unlock.
Image: HMP Elmley is currently operating with a 65% remand population
The staff member was ok. But it was violent.
Officer Price, who manages the wing, told Sky News it’s symptomatic of tight conditions, particularly in the winter as the heating is on and the cells are hot.
Advertisement
“A lot of frustration builds up. It means there’s more chance of violence going up, of self harm going up, because they are spending so much time looking at the same four walls. One of my staff members got assaulted this morning – that is proof in the pudding,” he said.
At points here over the last six months they’ve had just four free cell spaces, operating at almost 100% capacity.
On Tuesday, the government is releasing another round of prisoners early in an effort to free up space across an overcrowded prison estate.
Eligible offenders can be freed after serving 40% of their sentence. It’s a measure they’re trialling for 18 months.
Alongside this, they’ve launched a review of sentencing policy led by former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke who will be considering the effectiveness of fines and tougher community sentences, as an alternative to custody.
Image: When the cells are hot ‘frustration’ among inmates builds up
The population pressures in this prison have been a bit better in recent weeks, but still, you can feel the friction.
The governor told us at times recently it’s felt like “a pressure cooker”, made worse by a summer of riots where there were “daily calls” to check that “every bed” was being used.
‘Every day is unpredictable’
What strikes you inside is just how loud it is – all the time.
This was by all accounts not the worst day inside a prison. In fact, it felt fairly typical.
But it was just so loud. Absolutely everywhere. Even when the prisoners were locked up – one inmate was blaring loud music from behind his cell door. It was a complete sensory overload.
Some of the staff told us that they’d developed hearing problems as a result of working inside.
Follow Sky News on WhatsApp
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
“Every day is unpredictable, you don’t know what you’re coming into,” said Officer Musmeci.
Asked what a bad day looks like, she reels off a list: “It could be fighting a fire, it could be giving CPR, it could be stopping a giant fight, a near on riot, it could be anything.
“Some days you come in and you’ve got all of that in one day. Some days you’ve got none of it,” she said.
Any time outside the cells feels frenetic.
We watched prisoners head from the wing to the servery as they got their lunch. I was asking staff about the food options but had to repeat my question a few times before I actually heard what they said.
Image: ‘The noise is like nothing I’d experienced before’
The clashing, the banging, the shouting. The noise is like nothing I’d experienced before.
The food options were screamed not said.
‘A revolving door’
On the menu was a tomato pasta dish, falafel and couscous, a chicken pie slice, or a cheese and tomato roll. The prison spends £3 a day per inmate on food.
It might not sound like a lot of money to spend on a person’s diet, and yet prisoners here suggest people being released are wanting to return to keep a roof over their head. They question the effectiveness of early release measures.
Matt, who is on remand for drug offences, told me it’s like “a revolving door”.
“I’m seeing a lot of people being released homeless. They’re coming back for breaches of one sort of another, because they’d rather be in prison. They want a roof over their head,” he said.
Timothy, also in prison for drug offences, said the same: “You’ve got people now that break the law purposefully because they haven’t got anywhere to live.
“I can name four people off the top of my head, but there’s more, that cause damage to come back because they haven’t got anywhere to live.”
This is predominately a remand jail – many are waiting to be sentenced or awaiting trial.
The prison is set up to be about 40% remand. They’re currently operating with a 65% remand population. Many of them only stay for a short amount of time, which makes purposeful activity much more restricted.
Image: The governor told Sky News at times recently it’s felt like ‘a pressure cooker’
“It can be very difficult”, said Mandy Huggins, head of education at Elmley. “There’s a high churn.”
We’re inside the laundry room where the more serious offenders work.
“What it means is that you have a higher level of unemployed prisoners. The last thing we want is people in their cells longer than they need to be. Or people that want to work that aren’t able to,” Ms Huggins said.
You can tell the staff really care about implementing these schemes. Success for Ms Huggins is “impacting the prisoners’ lives”.
But with population pressures the way they are, almost everything is more difficult. And there’s some way to go before the prison estate is out of this crisis.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
3:50
From September: ‘There wasn’t one space on the prison wing’
The government said it “inherited prisons in crisis, within days of collapse” and is clear it is implementing measures such as the review of sentencing to “ensure we never again have more prisoners than prison spaces”.
It said it has been “forced to introduce an early release programme to stop a crisis that would have overwhelmed the criminal justice system, meaning we would no longer be able to lock up dangerous criminals and protect the public”.
The government has pledged to recruit 1,000 more trainee probation officers by March 2025.
The first thing you notice when immigration officers stop a possible illegal moped delivery driver is the speed in which the suspect quickly taps on their mobile.
“We’re in their WhatsApp groups – they’ll be telling thousands now that we’re here… so our cover is blown,” the lead immigration officer tells me.
“It’s like a constant game of cat and mouse.”
Twelve Immigration Enforcement officers, part of the Home Office, are joining colleagues from Avon and Somerset Police in a crackdown on road offences and migrants working illegally.
The West of England and Wales has seen the highest number of arrests over the last year for illegal workers outside of London.
“It is a problem… we’re tackling it,” Murad Mohammed, from Immigration Enforcement, says. He covers all the devolved nations.
“This is just one of the operations going on around the country, every day of the week, every month of the year.”
Image: Murad Mohammed, from Immigration Enforcement, says his team are attempting to tackle the issue
Just outside the Cabot Circus shopping complex, we stop a young Albanian man who arrived in the UK on the back of a truck.
He’s on an expensive and fast-looking e-bike, with a new-looking Just Eat delivery bag.
He says he just uses it for “groceries” – but the officer isn’t buying it. He’s arrested, but then bailed instantly.
We don’t know the specifics of his case, but one officer tells me this suspected offence won’t count against his asylum claim.
Such is the scale of the problem – the backlog, loopholes and the complexity of cases – that trying to keep on top of it feels impossible.
This is one of many raids happening across the UK as part of what the government says is a “blitz” targeting illegal working hotspots.
Angela Eagle, the border security and asylum minister, joins the team for an hour at one of Bristol’sretail parks, scattered with fast food chains and, therefore, delivery bikes.
Image: Border security and asylum minister, Angela Eagle, speaks to Sky News
She says arrests for illegal working are up over the last year by 51% from the year before, to more than 7,000.
“If we find you working, you can lose access to the hotel or the support you have [been] given under false pretences,” she said.
“We are cracking down on that abuse, and we intend to keep doing so.”
There are reports that asylum seekers can rent legitimate delivery-driver accounts within hours of arriving in the country – skipping employment legality checks.
Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and Just Eat all told Sky News they’re continuing to strengthen the technology they use to remove anyone working illegally.
But a new Border Security Bill, working its way through Parliament, could see companies fined £60,000 for each illegal worker discovered, director disqualifications and potential prison sentences of up to five years.
“I had them all in to see me last week and I told them in no uncertain terms that we take a very tough line on this kind of abuse and they’ve got to change their systems so they can drive it out and off their platforms,” the minister tells me.
For some of those who arrive, a bike and a phone provide a way to repay debts to gang masters.
There were eight arrests today in Bristol, one or two taken into custody, but it was 12 hours of hard work by a dozen immigration officers and the support of the police.
As two mopeds are pushed onto a low-loader, you can’t help but feel, despite the best intentions, that at the moment, this is a losing battle.
The officers who confronted the Southport killer have described, for the first time publicly, how they disarmed him – as they joined a list of 70 officers nominated for a police bravery award.
Sergeant Greg Gillespie, 42, PC Luke Holden, 31, and PCSO Tim Parry, 32, were the first to arrive as Axel Rudakubana rampaged with a knife through a holiday dance school last summer.
Speaking to Sky Newsabout what they saw when arriving at the scene, Sgt Gillespie said: “There was maybe 20 or 25 adults and all of them were looking at me, all of them have this look of terror and fear, panic on their faces and I knew whatever it was we were turning up to was really, really bad.”
His colleagues drove fast from Southport police station and were thirty seconds or so behind Sgt Gillespie.
Image: PC Luke Holden (left), PCSO Tim Parry (centre), Sgt Greg Gillespie (right) nominated for the police bravery awards
PC Holden said he saw “a large puddle of blood on the floor outside the door” and said Sgt Gillespie “just looked at me” and asked if he was ready.
“That was it, there was no conversation. There was nothing else going on. He said, ‘Are you ready?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go’.”
PCSO Parry, who doesn’t carry a baton or pepper spray like his colleagues, went to the back of the building to stop people from entering, help anyone who needed it, and get information on the number of suspects inside.
He said: “It was a horrific scene to really go into because I was so unprepared with the equipment I had.”
Sgt Gillespie and PC Holden identified the suspect at the top of the stairs, a bloodied knife in his hand, and walked towards him shoulder to shoulder.
“I saw him, made eye contact with him, saw his facial expression, saw his body language and the way he moved himself into a position at the top of the stairs, showing us he had a knife,” Sgt Gillespie said.
“He was fronting us, like he was saying, ‘I’ve got a knife, what are you going to do about it?’
“And I think the second he realised he was looking at two people who weren’t scared of him, who were going to attack him, all that bravery that he must have summoned up to attack defenceless children, he lost that straightaway, and he threw down the knife.”
In January, Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the attack, admitted the murders of seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King, aged six and Alice da Silva Aguiar, who was nine, as well 10 charges of attempted murder, as well as possessing terrorist material and production of the biological toxin, ricin.
Image: A machete was also found at Rudakubana’s home. Pic: Merseyside Police
Dozens nominated for bravery awards
The Merseyside trio are among 70 officers from around England and Wales who have been nominated for tonight’s Police Federation national bravery awards.
They include two sergeants from Sussex who swam to the rescue of a vulnerable teenager struggling to stay afloat at night off Brighton beach.
Image: Footage of Sergeant Craig Lees and Sergeant Matthew Seekings rescuing a woman from the sea in Brighton. Pic: Sussex police
Police with torches had located her in the sea fifty metres from the shore, but a lifeline they threw to her didn’t reach.
Sergeant Craig Lees said: “We could see that she was starting to struggle with the cold and tide, and she began to dip under the water. We knew we needed to do something, and that was that we needed to get into the water and swim out to her.”
His colleague and friend Sergeant Matthew Seekings said: “I don’t think it’s in the blood of any police officer to watch somebody at risk or somebody needing help and not do something.
“When you’re in the sea, it’s pitch black, you don’t even know where the bottom is, it’s terrifying, and I can only imagine how the female was feeling.”
Image: Sergeant Craig Lees and Sergeant Matthew Seekings who are nominated for a bravery award. Pic: Sussex police
Battling their own fatigue, the two officers managed to get the girl to shore, where colleagues and paramedics were waiting to take over.
In Devizes, Wiltshire, PC Nicola Crabbe was called to a town centre fight between two men, one of whom had a knife.
Image: PC Nicola Crabbe from Wiltshire police who is nominated for a police bravery award
‘Just saturated in blood’
“They were grappling, and they were just saturated in blood,” said PC Crabbe, who confronted the man she thought was the knifeman.
“I was in the middle of the road when I grabbed hold of him, and there was a member of the public just there, and that’s when he explained to me that I had the wrong person.”
Image: CCTV image of PC Nicola Crabbe from Wiltshire police dealing with a fight in Devizes. Pic: Wiltshire police
Armed only with a baton and Pava pepper spray, she grappled with the suspect, trying to find his knife.
She said: “At one point he grabbed my hair and kind of dragged me around a bit, so I Pava’d him which just had no effect at all.”
PC Crabbe managed to restrain the knifeman until colleagues arrived and arrested him.
The full list of award winners will be announced on Thursday night during a dinner at a west London hotel.
A group of Labour MPs has urged Sir Keir Starmer to do more to tackle the rising cost of living amid fears the party could lose the next election to Reform.
The MPs are launching a new splinter group, the living standards coalition, to shift the focus to everyday concerns such as food, energy bills and housing.
In a letter to the prime minister, the group’s members warned that one question would be on the mind of voters at the next election: “Did this Labour government make me better off?”
“After 14 years of living in a no-growth economy and with some of the highest bills in Europe, our constituents are struggling to make ends meet,” they said.
“More of them are turning away from democracy and towards populism as they can’t afford a decent life.”
The coalition is the latest splinter group to form since the party’s landslide election victory a year ago.
More on Labour
Related Topics:
Other groups include the Labour growth group, which focuses on delivering economic growth, and MPs in Red Wall constituencies in the North who are alive to the threat Reform poses in their seats.
While the MPs stress they are supportive of the actions the government has taken so far, the forming of a new group could be interpreted as a sign of restlessness in the parliamentary party, especially given the fallout of last week’s botched welfare vote.
In the letter, first reported by The Guardian, the MPs write: “We are here to support your efforts to go further and faster on raising living standards. We come from every corner of our party.
“To raise living standards, we support government interventions that will help to increase incomes and lower costs.
“We welcome interventions that will raise incomes. We welcome investment in labour- intensive building, education, and healthcare jobs that will raise living standards through employment. We welcome the Employment Rights Bill that will get wages rising.”
They added: “We know that some will try to stop us raising living standards.
“They will try to block us from building the affordable housing and windfarms we need to get bills down. They oppose the way we have raised revenue from the very wealthiest to invest in childcare and our NHS.
“We are glad you are keeping this government’s focus on raising living standards. We stand in support of you. It is the most important issue to our constituents and the country.”