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HMP SWANSEA: Prison healthcare £4.8m short as frozen funding pot loses a third of its value, MPs warn

Healthcare for prisoners at HMP Swansea and two other Welsh jails is running £4.8m short, MPs have warned, after the funding pot meant to cover it was left frozen for more than a decade.

A committee of MPs found that the money the UK Government sends to Wales for prisoner healthcare has not risen since 2014 — and has quietly lost almost a third of its value since.

The finding comes in Jagged Justice, a report on prisons and rehabilitation in Wales published this month by the House of Commons Welsh Affairs Committee.

It is the same inquiry that branded the stalled Swansea women’s centre in Cockett an “unacceptable” delay.

The healthcare money is a single transfer covering three prisons — HMP Swansea, HMP Cardiff and HMP Usk & Prescoed.

It was set at £2.5m in 2014 and has stayed there ever since, even as costs and prisoner numbers have climbed.

Adjusted for inflation, that £2.5m is now worth just £1.9m in real terms, according to analysis by the House of Commons Scrutiny Unit.

To match what it could buy in 2014, the transfer would need to stand at around £3.4m today.

The gap is stark when set against what the care actually costs.

Healthcare at HMP Swansea alone cost just under £2.47m in 2024/25, figures from Swansea Bay University Health Board show.

Across all three prisons, the bill came to more than £7.25m — leaving a shortfall of £4.8m between the frozen transfer and the real cost.

The committee said prisoner populations in Wales have “higher, more complex and more concentrated” health needs than people in the community, making the squeeze harder to absorb.

It has called on the UK Government to revise the funding formula and uplift the transfer in line with inflation.

The report also lays bare wider strains at HMP Swansea.

In the 12 months before inspectors visited, around a third of prisoners leaving the jail were released either homeless or into unstable, temporary accommodation on their first night out.

It is a problem with real consequences. The committee heard that people released from prison into homelessness are twice as likely to reoffend.

Locally, one response has been the conversion of the former central police station on Alexandra Road into 68 rooms of supported accommodation, known as Llys Glas.

The building is owned by social housing landlord Codi, while Swansea Council runs the on-site support service — an arrangement designed to move people out of bed-and-breakfast placements and bring help together under one roof.

Among those it supports are people recently released from prison, with the council working alongside the probation service to place former inmates and link them to the help they need.

The committee’s findings on resettlement chime with concerns it raised about Welsh probation more widely, with the Swansea and Neath Port Talbot service rated “requires improvement” earlier this year.

Time out of cell at HMP Swansea also varied sharply, the report found — from around seven hours a day for those in full-time work down to as little as 45 minutes for new arrivals.

Inspectors have long warned that prisoners kept locked up cannot take part in the education, training and work that help cut reoffending.

The report flagged cross-border problems too, with Swansea Bay health bosses describing difficulties accessing the medical records of patients registered with English GPs when they arrive in custody.

The health board told MPs that things would improve “if there was one single system or there were more systems which communicated with each other.”

HMP Swansea is one of five prisons in Wales, four of them in the south, and one of three covered by the frozen healthcare transfer.

The committee’s wider verdict was that justice in Wales is held back by overcrowded prisons, staffing pressures and UK Government policy that does not always fit the country’s particular needs.

It is not the first time MPs on the committee have raised the alarm over a Welsh prison. In March, the same committee warned that plans to expand Bridgend’s HMP Parc could “risk lives” after 17 men died there in a single year.

For now, the committee wants ministers to start with the money — uprating a healthcare transfer that, on its own figures, has been falling behind for over a decade.

Related stories from Swansea Bay News

COCKETT: Women’s centre forced through against 215 objections still not open four years on
MPs brand delays to the stalled Swansea Residential Women’s Centre “unacceptable.”

PRISON PLAN WARNING: HMP Parc expansion ‘risks lives’ after 17 deaths in one year, warn MPs
The same committee called for a halt to the expansion of Bridgend’s troubled prison.

Swansea and Neath Port Talbot probation service told it is failing to keep the public safe
Inspectors rated the local probation service “requires improvement.”

Former Swansea police station turned into 68-room homeless accommodation
Llys Glas offers supported accommodation, including for people leaving prison.

#CodiGroup #HMPSwansea #homelessness #LlysGlas #MinistryOfJustice #RuthJones #SwanseaCouncil #WelshAffairsCommittee

Kit Peters Jun 16

COCKETT: Women’s centre forced through against 215 objections still not open four years on — and ministers still won’t confirm if it ever will

A women’s centre that Cockett residents fought hard to stop — and lost — still has not opened four years after it was announced, and MPs now say ministers cannot even confirm whether it ever will.

The Swansea Residential Women’s Centre, planned for the Trehafod building in Cockett, was meant to open its doors in 2024.

Today it stands empty, its £10m funding pulled, while a cross-party committee of MPs brands the delays “unacceptable.”

The verdict comes in Jagged Justice, a report on prisons and rehabilitation in Wales published this month by the House of Commons Welsh Affairs Committee.

It is a striking turn in a saga that pitched the Ministry of Justice against the very community now left with a stalled site on its doorstep.

When the plans first emerged in May 2022, they met fierce local resistance.

The proposal — to convert and extend the Trehafod building, in the grounds of the former Cefn Coed Hospital, into a 12-bed centre for around 50 local women a year — drew 215 letters of objection.

In September 2022, Swansea Council‘s planning committee refused the scheme, going against the advice of its own officers.

But the Ministry of Justice appealed, and in August 2023 a Welsh Government-appointed planning inspector overturned the refusal and granted consent.

The inspector attached a condition barring the site from ever being used as secure accommodation such as a detention centre or prison.

At the time, Cockett councillor Mike Durke said residents were “hugely disappointed” and felt their concerns had been ignored, though he noted they took some reassurance from that condition.

The centre was designed as an alternative to short prison sentences, allowing women to serve community sentences of up to 12 weeks close to their families.

Only women from the local area would have been admitted, and the site would not have been secure, meaning residents could come and go during the day.

It was meant to be the first of its kind in England and Wales — a pilot the previous UK government described as “ground-breaking.”

Then, in March 2025, the Ministry of Justice told the committee the funding had been “reallocated by the previous government during the protracted planning process for the site.”

In other words, the money was moved during the very planning fight the centre had to win.

The current government has not restored it. Ministers told the committee the project was “paused” while they awaited the findings of a Women’s Justice Board and the outcome of a spending review.

In December 2025, prisons minister Lord Timpson said he hoped to be “in a position where we can make a decision” on the Swansea centre in January 2026.

The committee says it has received no further update since.

Its conclusion is blunt. The centre “was due to open its doors two years ago,” the report says, but the funding was reallocated and MPs are “still waiting on the current UK Government to decide whether the project will be going ahead at all.”

“These delays are unacceptable,” the committee found, pointing also to a lack of clarity over how the centre would actually operate and who it would admit.

The MPs were also clear about what the centre must not become. Drawing on evidence from the charities Clinks and Women in Prison, the report warns it should be a genuine alternative to custody and “not just become a prison in all but name.”

The committee has called on the Ministry of Justice to confirm “as soon as possible” whether the site will open and, if so, when — and to set out its admissions criteria.

The wider context is stark. Wales has no women’s prison, so Welsh women given custodial sentences are held in England — 77% of them at HMP Eastwood Park or HMP Styal, often far from home and family.

The report notes that 78% of women given immediate custody in Wales in 2024 were sentenced to 12 months or less — short terms that MPs heard were “long enough to lose your home and children” but did little to address the causes of offending.

Supporters argue centres like the one earmarked for Cockett are a cheaper and more effective way of breaking that cycle than a short spell behind bars.

For now, though, the Trehafod building remains shut — a scheme the community tried to stop, the courts allowed, and the government has yet to deliver.

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