Almost one in six prisons have no trained riot officers

There are no prison officers trained to deal with riots at nearly one in six jails in England and Wales, the government has admitted despite a surge in deployments last year.

- ANDY GREGORY

With the overcrowding crisis inside increasingly violent prisons fuelling the prospect of serious disorder, The Independent revealed last week that the number of officers trained to deal with riots as part of so-called Tornado squads has plummeted by almost a third in just five years.

That means there were just 1,620 Tornado officers across the entire prison estate as of 27 February - down from 2,310 in 2018. Furthermore, 17 out of the 120 prisons in England and Wales had no Tornado officers at all, while a further 21 prisons had fewer than 10 such officers. The concession was made by prisons minister Edward Argar in response to a series of parliamentary questions by Labour's Ruth Cadbury.