There’s a new row within the Government. This time Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, is rejecting pleas from her old department to exempt prison officers from new visa rules introduced in the summer. Under the new scheme, skilled worker visas will only be issued for employees earning a salary of over £41,700, a substantial increase from the previous level of £29,000.
This means that most prison officer roles outside of London would no longer qualify for skilled worker visas.
Why does this matter? Many people will be surprised that foreign nationals are allowed to staff our jails at all. Indeed, prison officers have only been eligible for skilled worker visas since October 2023. How many foreign nationals can there really be working on the frontlines in our jails?
Astonishingly, prisons have recruited over 1,000 officers from overseas in the past two years, with the vast majority of foreign hires coming from Nigeria. Indeed, according to Ministry of Justice data, 11.5 per cent of all officers hired in 2024 come from Nigeria, with Ghana a distant second on 2.1 per cent. It seems that very many Nigerians apply to work in the prison service, as they represented 29 per cent of all applicants last year.
To put this 1,000 foreign national staff in perspective, there were 22,702 frontline prison officers according to the last published statistics. Staff turnover is high. In the last year, while 2,453 frontline officers were hired, 2,823 left the prison service. This is why our jails are desperately hiring. They can’t hold on to staff. And in the last two years foreign nationals have become a significant source of new officers.
From speaking with senior civil servants on condition of anonymity I understand that the foreign hires are particularly concentrated in a few jails, with some having over 20 per cent of officers here on visas. This means that if their visas are cancelled some prisons may very quickly find themselves forced to close wings and send inmates elsewhere.
Reports of foreign national officer quality are mixed. I’ve heard stories of officers whose English language skills are so poor that they are functionally unable to do the job, and only really able to lock and unlock cells. Some are well-regarded, arriving with good experience and a solid work ethic.
Of great concern though is how effective vetting can be. While the Ministry of Justice insists that foreign national hires “are required to provide a criminal record certificate” as part of the hiring process, it’s unclear what checks are done to ensure the validity of this document, a matter of particular concern when applicants come from countries known to have high levels of corruption.
The truth is though that we shouldn’t need to hire them at all. A trainee prison officer will start on a salary of between £30,000 and £40,000 depending on location. It is a job open to 18-year-olds without any qualifications. It offers a secure job, a career path and a civil service pension. So why is it so hard to hire young Britons into these roles? The youth unemployment rate is rising, up to 14.5 per cent according to the latest statistics. This means almost three million young people are “economically inactive”. Surely 3,000 (0.1 per cent) of them would make suitable prison officers.
Across the British economy, we have made entire departments and sectors dependent on hiring migrants. This has accelerated since the Boriswave, where the Tory government increased net migration to an unprecedented 906,000 in one year. The former PM has recently acknowledged that this was a policy he chose to pursue after Brexit in an effort to suppress wages and stop inflation rising.
This is the insanity of mass migration. It is explicitly pursued to drive down wages for native workers. The state is hiring foreigners instead of solving the problem of vast youth unemployment, and creating the bizarre situation where ministers of the Crown are pleading with the Home Secretary that they be allowed to hire more foreign prison officers. Something which was only made legal two years ago has become foundational to the survival of our prison service.
It’s not good enough. A government spokesperson told me “working in prison is an extraordinary job and we are always looking for people who want to help keep the public safe”. If so, our jails should be able to staff themselves from the British population. If there are issues with hiring and retention then prison leaders need to improve conditions for staff.
They’re going to have to. I understand that the Home Secretary will not budge on this. Good. It’s time for the prison service, like the rest of the economy, to wean itself off cheap migrant labour, and start investing in British workers.
