London: Hostage incidents and disturbances across the country’s jails are rising sharply, intensifying fears that Britain’s prisons are at crisis point. The mounting unrest has seen a corresponding increase in the deployment of specialist teams sent in to quell riots and protests.

Figures in a letter from prisons minister Andrew Selous to Labour’s shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, reveal that in 2010, the year the coalition took power, there were 16 hostage incidents. For the year June 2013 to May 2014, the most up-to-date figures in the letter, the number had increased to 73. Contrasting the two periods shows there was also a large rise in the number of “concerted indiscipline incidents”, from 104 in 2010 to 154 between June 2013 and May 2014.

The figures also show there has been a significant rise in the number of “incidents at height” — disturbances on rooftops or in the protective netting erected on wings to stop prisoners falling. They show that there were 136 incidents in March 2014, the latest month available for analysis, compared with 80 in the same month the previous year. Call-outs of the National Tactical Response Group, the prison service’s anti-riot squad, have almost doubled between 2010 and the end of 2014. In 2010 the group was sent to prisons on 118 occasions. Last year this had increased to 223, an 89 per cent rise.

The group was called out 15 times to Nottingham last year, 11 to Ranby in Nottinghamshire and eight to both Lindholme in South Yorkshire and Hewell in Worcestershire. “This massive surge in hostage incidents and incidents on high is further proof that this Tory-led government are leaving prisons in a worse state than they found them,” Khan said. “Our jails are more violent than in 2010, with staff in perpetual fear of assault. Suicides and self-harm are up and prisoners are spending more time idling in their cells or on the landing instead of training courses, education or working. This is not the rehabilitation revolution that was promised. Instead we have a full-blown prisons crisis. As a result, offenders are being released unreformed, meaning too many reoffend, creating more victims of crime and a revolving door in our prisons.”

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said many of the disturbances were triggered by disquiet over seemingly little things, such as shortened visiting hours and cuts in the prison food budget. “These figures indicate the sheer desperation felt by prisoners, some of whom spend weeks locked up in their cells, hardly ever getting out,” Crook said. Last week Lord Woolf, the former lord chief justice who led the investigation into Britain’s biggest prison riot, at Strangeways in 1990, called for a new inquiry into prisons. Woolf said conditions were now as bad as in 1990 and warned Britain was again “heading for a crisis”. In his letter to Khan, Selous acknowledged there had been a rise “in deployments of the National Tactical Response Group, which provides specialist national resources to assist both public and private sector establishments in safely managing and resolving incidents in prisons in 2013 and 2014”. Selous told the Observer: “There has been no rise in the number of serious incidents being attended, and last year the overwhelming majority of call-outs were for minor incidents — including occasions where they attended as a precautionary measure and the situation was resolved by prison staff.” He added: “Violence in our prisons is totally unacceptable and the rate of assaults taking place now is lower than in 2008.” Khan said there was a need for a “truly independent” inspection regime to ensure conditions in jails were subject to adequate supervision. Last year the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, said that he would not be reapplying for his job after the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, revealed he would not renew his contract when it expires in July.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd