Around 86,000 people are in prisons in England and Wales.

The prison population peaked at 88,000 in 2011, partly explained by the riots that summer, before falling to 84,000 at the end of 2012.

The total population of the UK has also increased over time. There were 182 prisoners per 100,000 adults in England and Wales in 2015. This is higher than historic levels back to 1901, apart from the peak in 2011, according to the House of Commons Library.

Space in prisons

The total number of prisoners that the Ministry of Justice says it can hold “without serious risk”, the operational capacity, has increased broadly with the number of prisoners.

However, the uncrowded capacity which represents “the good, decent standard” accommodation the service aims for has been lower than the population for almost all of the past 20 years.

A quarter of prisoners are held in crowded accommodation according to official figures.

Number of staff

Around 24,000 people work in operational roles in the prison service. 10,500 more work in non-operational roles, like management, administration and services.

The number of staff in both areas has fallen since 2010, our earliest data. In March 2015 there  were 30% fewer operational staff, and 25% fewer non-operational staff, than there were in March 2010. The fall in the number of non-operational staff is partly due to jobs being transferred to other organisations.

There are 15,000 ‘front-line’ prison officers working at band 3 or 4, who are not in management or supporting roles. That number is down from 20,000 in 2010, measuring by ‘full-time equivalents’ rather than headcount in all cases.

We’ve looked at these figures in more detail in a previous factcheck.

More frontline officers left than were recruited or promoted every year until 2015. Although this changed in 2015 (with 507 net new officers) the total number of full-time equivalent frontline officers was still lower than the previous year.

The government announced on 3 November that it plans to recruit 2,500 new frontline officers by 2018.

Violence in prison

All headline measures of prison safety show increasing violence in the last year.

Statistics are measured for the 12 months to September (deaths) or June (other measures).

Last year 324 people died in prison, a 21% increase compared to 2015. 107 of these deaths were self-inflicted (the prison service doesn’t assume intention). For every 1,000 prisoners 1.3 ended their own life, up from 1.1 in 2015.

The number of self-harm incidents increased by 26% in 2016, and the number of people self-harming by 23%. There were 36,000 incidents of self-harm. For every 1,000 prisoners, 123 self-harmed. In 2015 it had been 101 per 1,000.

Assaults on other prisoners and staff are also more common. There were 208 ‘prisoner on prisoner’ assault incidents per 1,000 prisoners, an increase of 32%. Assaults on prison staff increased by 40%, to a rate of 70 incidents per 1,000 prisoners.

The House of Commons Library has published a report about recent concerns over prison safety, examining possible causes of the increasing violence.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons focused on the subject in its last annual report, saying safety outcomes from its assessments were worse than any time between 2007 and 2014.

The government put out a White Paper, Prison Safety and Reform, in November 2016, promising to “address the current level of violence and safety issues in our prisons”.

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Officers of Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, are not entitled to 'diplomatic immunity' from criminal prosecution.

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Just under half the cases won against the UK at the European Court of Human Rights have involved someone convicted or suspected of a criminal offence.

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In response to claims that the NHS is being privatised under the coalition, the Prime Minister has said there’s been a “tiny increase” in the proportion of NHS spending going to private providers – from 5% to 6%. Mr. Cameron is correct; private providers made up 4.9% of NHS spending in 2010/2011 and 6.1% in 2013/2014 according to […]

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Newspapers reported that 1-in-3 South Africans is obese. This, they said, makes the country the most obese in the region. But the 1-in-3 claim is based on outdated data and care must be taken with rankings.

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The march towards Brexit seems relentless. Theresa May urged people to vote to stay in the EU but she knows the political cost of rowing back back from the referendum result at this stage. When a High Court judgement appeared to put a spanner in the works, the prime minister was quick to assure European leaders that the plan to trigger the exit process in Spring 2017 had not been derailed. This is an interesting metaphor. Rails are fixed, and once you run along them you are committed to where they go. But can being too wedded to a decision do more harm than good?

In looking at how businesses of all sizes and in many sectors survive and thrive over the last 25 years, we’ve found there are common behaviours and attitudes. Flexibility in decision making is a key factor, based on an openness to changes in the environment in and around the business.

The ability to sense change; to adapt quickly and cleverly are crucial to being a successful innovator. Innovators don’t just adapt in terms of how they manage and what products and services they offer, they are also able to quickly and humbly reverse decisions that no longer make so much sense as the world changes around them. Fixed, dogmatic decisions create death in businesses.

Flexible friends

The regularly invoked phrase, “the British people have spoken”, is a troubling one from the point of view of flexibility. Referendums are clunky and risky when complexity exists and when environments are volatile. The majority in that vote was relatively small and the conversation is clearly not over. New information is coming to light, new impacts and consequences are emerging that weren’t clearly known at the time. In a small business, the owner or the board would ignore such volatility at their peril.

The government says it is determined to respect the referendum results. And even if the legal arguments end up handing a vote to parliament before Article 50 can be triggered, MPs currently seem likely to respect the original vote. Political pressures have a habit of changing, however, and there will be likely be fierce lobbying from constituents who have rethought – that “things have changed since that vote years ago”. When customer preferences change, suppliers would be crazy to ignore those changes.

The longer parliamentary scrutiny runs, the closer we will be to general election. The government’s temporary monopoly on democracy will have unravelled into fears of losing power. Under similar conditions of uncertainty a small business would simply adapt and change, opening itself up to new ideas and possibilities. Committing to a decision, seeing things through, can be the right thing to do in some circumstances. In the light of opposition, tenacity can be a mark of good leadership. But that tenacity can become a fatal bloody mindedness when uncertainty or new information demands a genuine and honest revisiting of an earlier choice.

Dogma tired

If the UK government were a small business then we would be forced to ask if its leader and board were being more dogmatic than tenacious? Why do I ask that? Because those calling for the Brexit decision to be revisited are not all partisan opposers. New, credible, information has come to light which would inform a rethink by British people in both camps – we now know that sterling does indeed go into freefall, and that recession doesn’t appear to bite immediately. Even one of those who originally penned Article 50 is pointing to the reversability of the Brexit decision.

There is also evidence that many who voted in the referendum feel they didn’t have access to honest information at the time on which to base their free decision. Many are reported to feel duped or manipulated. One academic even claims the Leave campaign behaved with criminal irresponsibility. Leave campaigners are also able to point to holes in what they had labelled as the Remain camp’s “project fear”.

There are now new forecasts about the impact on our economy and our currency and even on the implications for UK citizens needing visas to travel into Europe. Clearly the picture could be radically changing. The notion of acting on an ever more outdated snapshot decision is akin to a business acting as if interest rates have not been cut, or relying on last year’s forecast for oil prices. Such behaviour is the road to ruin.

Many in government have confused strong leadership with sticking to decisions regardless of external or internal change. Such behaviour has killed many a business. It results in a failure to innovate, a hesitancy in questioning decisions that no longer make the same sense they did at the time they were made.

This doesn’t mean that the referendum result should be ignored or reversed. However, if we are to learn from the analogy of a fleet-footed small business which is innovative, flexible, and ultimately successful, it makes sense to review major decisions on an ongoing basis. This is what learning organisations do. Dogmatism can be corporate death. Small businesses change in order to survive. Successful ones are humble enough to let go of decisions that no longer hold true. The UK government operates in an equally changing environment, and “Brexit means Brexit” might just be one fixed decision too many.

Paul Levy owns shares in CATS3000 Ltd

Labour’s advertisement to businesses in the Financial Times today warns that the biggest risk to British business is the threat of an EU exit. The risk? Over 3 million jobs “linked to trade with the European Union”. It’s a familiar claim that often gets described as jobs ‘dependent’ on our membership with the EU — but the figures...

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The Prime Minister has been accused of breaking a pledge on child tax credits. So what exactly was promised?

The post Has the Prime Minister broken a promise on tax credits? appeared first on Full Fact.