SHADOW justice secretary Steve Reed said Labour would give prison officers the professional status and respect the job deserves at the Prison Officers Association conference today.

But the union’s general secretary Steve Gillan said members wanted clear manifesto commitments on restoring the right to strike and lowering the retirement age.

Mr Reed slammed 13 years of Tory failure of the criminal justice system, including cuts to policing budgets, court closures and “the fact that barely two in 100 reported rapes leads to a trial.

The Conservatives’ cavalier approach to public safety had left prisons with a severe recruitment and retention crisis, he said.

By contrast Labour would recruit more neighbourhood police and reform the prison system to use “learning from the science of childhood trauma to intervene to tackle reoffending,” the Croydon North MP promised.

But though he highlighted the pledges on workplace rights in the New Deal for Workers, Mr Reed did not mention the ongoing ban on strike action by prison officers in England and Wales.

The Scottish government “has restored the right to strike — and the sky hasn’t caved in,” POA leader Mr Gillan said in reply, calling for clear manifesto commitments because a “gentleman’s agreement” on restoring prison officer rights with Tony Blair’s leadership had been unceremoniously ditched by Labour in power.

He stressed the union’s calls since 2016 for a royal commission to undertake a root-and-branch review of the state of the prison service. “We don’t want reform, because reform means to us privatisation and budget cuts: we’ve had enough of that over the past 30 years,” he warned.

He thanked Mr Reed for raising the issue of violence in the youth justice estate, with young offenders at Cookham Wood found making weapons out of scavenged metal objects to protect themselves from other detainees.

But he said that young offenders were “causing our members immense damage.”

At Cookham Wood, he noted, a young prisoner was nearly beaten to death by five others. “If it wasn’t for the professionalism of the staff, God knows we’d have been talking about the death in custody of a young person.”

If police officers could be permitted to use Pava spray as a control mechanism for young people, so should prison officers, he urged.