Sweeping changes will also include ranking jails in league tables and improving quality of education for prisoners

David Cameron will reveal plans for wholesale changes to the prison system including giving more power to prison governors and ranking the 121 jails in England and Wales in league tables.

In a speech in London on Monday he will lay out a strategy to give governors “full autonomy” over how they run their prisons and spend their budgets, with six jails set to get “reform prison” status by the end of 2016 and half of all prisons set to acquire those freedoms by 2020.

The prime minister will admit the failure of the current system is “scandalous” and say that prisoners should be viewed as “potential assets to be harnessed”.

In a sign of how government thinking has been influenced by education policy, new prison performance data will be published enabling jails to be compared in league tables on measures such as reoffending.

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There will also be a drive to improve the quality of education in prisons, with David Laws, the former Lib Dem schools minister, taking an unpaid role chairing a new social enterprise working on recruiting top graduates into prison education.

The plans will be included in a prisons bill introduced in the next session of parliament, and the government is promising to protect the £130m prison education budget in cash terms.

Explaining the need for reform in what No 10 is describing as the first speech from a prime minister focusing solely on prisons since John Major in the 1990s, Cameron will say: “The failure of our system today is scandalous.”

“Forty-six per cent of all prisoners will reoffend within a year of release; 60% of short-sentenced prisoners will reoffend within the same period. And current levels of prison violence, drug taking and self-harm should shame us all.

“In a typical week, there will be almost 600 incidents of self-harm; at least one suicide; and 350 assaults, including 90 on staff. This failure really matters.”

He will argue that reoffending costs the country up to £13bn a year. But Cameron will also make a moral case for a renewed focus on cutting reoffending through education and rehabilitation, saying that for too long governments have adopted an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to prisons.

“When I say we will tackle our deepest social problems and extend life chances, I want there to be no no-go areas. And that includes the 121 prisons in our country, where our social problems are most acute and people’s life chances are most absent,” he will say.

Cameron will insist that some offenders need to be locked up, that victims of crime should be the government’s first priority, and that “not everyone shows remorse and not everyone seeks redemption”.



He will say: “But I also strongly believe that we must offer chances to change; that for those trying hard to turn themselves around, we should offer hope; that in a compassionate country, we should help those who’ve made mistakes to find their way back on to the right path.

“In short: we need a prison system that doesn’t see prisoners as simply liabilities to be managed, but instead as potential assets to be harnessed.”

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Proclaiming that prison reform should be a “a great progressive cause in British politics”, Cameron will commit the government to publishing what No 10 describes as “proper data and meaningful metrics” that will enable the performance of different jails to be compared. These could include reoffending rates and employment outcomes for prisoners after their release, as well as information about progress made in literacy and other skills.

Cameron will also commit the government to implementing in full the recommendations of a review of prison education soon being published by Dame Sally Coates, the former headteacher who now runs a chain of academies. She is expected to call for governors to have more control over prison education budgets, instead of prison education services being run through regional programmes.

Coates will also work alongside Laws and Teach First, the programme that recruits high-achieving graduates into teaching, on a new initiative intended to ensure that prison education also attracts first-class recruits.

Cameron’s speech is the latest in a series of initiatives in recent weeks addressing life chances. In his party conference speech last autumn he said he wanted his second term in office to be marked by progress on social reform, and No 10 is making a series of announcements now because it thinks domestic politics will soon be entirely dominated by the EU referendum.

The speech will be warmly welcomed by Michael Gove, the reform-minded justice secretary who has spoken passionately about the need to improve prison education, although this will not necessarily have any effect on Gove’s decision whether or not to back Cameron’s campaign to keep Britain in the EU. Gove – a Eurosceptic by instinct – is said to be agonising over what to do, whereas most other cabinet ministers are now aligned with the in or out camps.