David Lammy had a good outing yesterday – they are as rare as hen’s teeth when you’re leading the Ministry of Justice – so he ought to take the win. The Deputy Prime Minister was in the House of Commons to make a statement on a report by Jonathan Hall KC into prison terrorist separation centres, following a horrific attack on officers at one of these units in HMP Frankland last year.
Convicted Islamist Hashem Abedi, responsible for the Manchester Arena bomb atrocity in 2017, allegedly attacked prison staff in the separation unit last October, attempted to murder three officers by stabbing them with improvised weapons and scalding them. It was a ferocious and unprovoked assault in what should have been one of our most closely supervised and secure pieces of prison real estate. In tone at least, David Lammy was equal to the task. He heaped praise on the prison officers – some of our country’s bravest men and women, who are up close and personal with people who have killed and often want to continue to kill in the name of a hateful ideology.
In his forensic review, Hall stated that there is a need for a ‘supermax’-type response to those extremists who still want to kill for ideas. He is right. He is also right that we shouldn’t concentrate this in a standalone ‘supermax’ terrorist prison, which would be a mecca for propagandised grievance and a nightmare to work in.
The prison service needs to convince Lammy that it has the stomach for the task
I have some connection with Hall’s work. I was the person who recommended to the Conservative government ten years ago that separation centres be set up to contain and control the power and influence of the most virulent ideologues, by removing them from their captive targets and placing them in conditions of high supervision. Hall, the government’s estimable terrorism watchdog and Lammy agreed that the concept of separation centres was sound. Both the government and Hall agreed with my view, made in a rapid review of Abedi’s assault for the then Conservative shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, that we must go much further to protect officers from intolerable levels of threat and harm.
Where Hall and I differed in terms of his key recommendation is on the matter of where a high-control unit for prisoners like Abedi – ideologically bulletproof criminals who will die in prison and would ideally like to take some infidels in uniform with them – should be located. Hall recommends one new unit with a ‘supermax’ top tier for the most violent. I suggested that this ought to be on military bases because of the many prison service system failures that his review pointed to. Incidentally, many of these failures have not been fixed since I urged ministers to get a recalcitrant prison service hierarchy to take extremism seriously a decade ago.
The prison service boss class has proved itself to be spectacularly inept at managing the terrorist threat. I was at the inquest into the death of terrorist Usman Khan, who murdered two young people while on release from prison in 2019. The then high-security prisons chief Richard Vince had to be prompted to confirm to counsel that separation centres – which he said were the subject of very considerable debate as to their ‘merits or otherwise’ – were prison service policy.
Vince has since been moved sideways to serve as executive director of security in the prison service. It wasn’t Hall’s place to comment on accountability, but it ought to have had more than a passing reference from Lammy in his statement yesterday.
In his review, Hall found that separation centres were hidebound by unnecessary bureaucracy and remote management that was more focused on process and the rights of terrorists than national security. This is all a function of corporate failure. It has almost seemed at times as if the whole concept of separation centres was initially set up to fail by making it virtually impossible for any radicalisers to actually be placed there.
Yesterday, Lammy accepted all thirteen of Jonathan Hall’s recommendations. The prison service now needs to convince the Justice Secretary that it has the stomach for the task. It will also need to demonstrate that it is willing to support staff and withstand lawfare when they try to hold the line against sometimes lethally sophisticated offenders.
On-site management of the terrorist separation unit, rather than by HQ fiat, ought to be the desired goal, as Hall recommends in his review. But as in the case of HMP Whitemoor, from which IRA prisoners escaped en masse in 1984, without proper leadership, such management still risks being hollowed out and circumvented by prisoners. At HMP Whitemoor – as Hall referenced – inmates overwhelmed frontline officers and sent managers scurrying for their offices. Officers then, as now, were isolated and ‘swarmed’. As Hall points out:
A desire to protest collectively against perceived injustices is a prerogative in the community, but not in a prison system where power must be exercised by the staff subject to prison rules, policies, management and external scrutiny.
It is difficult to know who will be able to provide the leadership that the new assertive management of these units requires. In the same way, it is difficult to see how the new approach to intelligence-gathering that Hall sets out in his review can be achieved by internal resources that have been underachieving for ten years.
Why on earth is co-operation with MI5 on intelligence-gathering, for example, still, as Hall puts it, ‘in the too difficult box’? Hall is equally and refreshingly clear about the ‘failed experiment’ of appeasing terrorist prisoners – something which had a role in Abeidi’s attack on staff:
It is a classic error that terrorist prisoners will not be violent to softer staff – this is to misunderstand the nature of terrorist ideology.
This is a report of the highest quality and urgency, setting out practical and clear-eyed steps that might, if implemented, see the risk of a prison officer murdered on duty by a terrorist recede. In my view, it is unacceptably high today.
There is, however, one very important caveat. Lammy must make independent oversight of counterterrorism policy in prisons a priority. I recommended the very same thing to a Conservative government ten years ago. The bureaucrats buried it. Now we know why.
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