WHEN Keir Starmer brought Rachel Reeves back into the shadow cabinet, she promised Labour in government would launch “the biggest wave of insourcing of public services for a generation.”

But under Reeves and Starmer, the government is making things flow in the opposite direction, as ministers keep announcing more outsourcing.

So in March, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood claimed that “this government is fixing the broken prison system we inherited” as she announced the opening of HM Millsike, a new 1,400-bed jail in East Yorkshire. Millsike might be another prison, but it is also another piece of outsourcing: privatisation specialist Mitie has a 10-year, £329 million contract to run the jail.

Mahmood claimed Millsike “sets the standard for the jails of the future, with cutting crime built into its very fabric.” She claimed that the jail’s mix of security, anti-drug measures and good-quality training means that when inmates leave, they are more likely to “stay on the straight and narrow.”

Mahmood is putting a lot of trust in Mitie. But does it deserve it?

Mitie doesn’t run any prisons apart from Millsike, but it does run several immigration detention centres. Last August, the chief inspector of prisons released an inspection report on one of them, Harmondsworth, a “removal” centre holding 454 men next to Heathrow airport. The inspector’s press release was headlined “drugs, despair and decrepit conditions.” Chief Inspector Charlie Taylor said his inspectors “found the worst conditions they have seen in immigration detention.”

Taylor said: “Much of the accommodation was decrepit, violence and other unacceptable behaviour, such as drug use, had substantially increased, and there had been numerous serious attempts at suicide in the centre.”

The inspectors found that “assaults had doubled since the last inspection and drug-taking, usually rare in Immigration Removal Centres, was now widespread. Inspectors could smell cannabis and saw detainees openly smoking in communal areas without being challenged by staff who largely kept to offices with ‘do not enter’ taped across their doors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly two-thirds of those detained in Harmondsworth said they had felt unsafe in the centre.”

Now, in fairness, in the Prison’s Inspectorate follow-up report this February found “there had been substantial improvements” at Harmondsworth. According to inspectors, “substantial investment had seen staff levels double, and a more engaged and upbeat team were receiving better management support and supervision. Problems with neglected, dirty and run-down communal areas had been addressed with a programme of rebuilding and refurbishment.”

The inspectors were impressed by the improvement. However, there were still problems as “progress remained too slow in improving protections for vulnerable detainees” and “mental health support services also remained inadequate to meet the considerable need,” so both these areas needed “renewed focus.”

So Mahmood is trusting that a private prisons provider who can run a dismal, drug-ridden service, but can also make sure that the service recovers if it is caught out by inspectors, will make her new jail “set the standard.”

This is not the first bad inspection given to Mitie. In 2021, an inspection found grim conditions at a Mitie unit for newly arrived asylum-seekers. This included what inspectors called a “disturbing” event when untrained Mitie staff responded with “excessive” force to a self-harming 14-year-old. One Mitie officer “kicked the boy with some force, before dragging him to the ground with one arm around his neck. Throughout the incident, there were too few staff to restrain him safely, and there was repeated use of unauthorised and potentially dangerous techniques.”

Mitie is being helped by another private provider to run Millsike prison. PeoplePlus will run workplace training and education for the prisoners. It was formed largely from the wreckage of another company, A4E, which supplied “welfare to work” services to the government, and crashed in a scandal about claiming for training and placements it hadn’t fulfilled.

Books on a crisis: new housing novels

I AM always on the lookout for “state of the nation” novels, for fiction that tries to imagine how characters negotiate the difficulties of living during our slow-motion social crisis.

Two recent novels I strongly recommend deal with the housing crisis. The “market” doesn’t provide decent housing at affordable prices, and never really has — who wants to make a profit from lots of cheap houses, when they can make more by building a smaller amount of decent ones? We once filled this hole by building millions of “social rent” council houses. Since Thatcher stopped that, we have slowly reverted to unaffordable rents and prices for often unpleasant accommodation.

One novel that — as its title suggests — has housing as a background is Keiran Goddard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which came out in paperback this year.

It’s about a group of friends who grew up together on a Midlands council estate. It’s slightly reminiscent of Trainspotting, though much less in-your-face, much lower key. The friends are a bit gritty, drink-and-drugsy. One is a bit more of a fighter, one more a dealer, and one becomes a wheeler-dealer businessman.

It’s a very readable, warm, moving drama about trying to make a good life out of low-pay jobs and imperfect housing choices. The estate is both somewhere it is possible to live well on a lower income, but also limited and increasingly hemmed in by redevelopment. Goddard is a poet, and the writing has a bit of flair — although occasionally this means the characters talk maybe a bit too “poetically” and sound a bit too like the author rather than a character. That said, it is a moving read that reflects our world.

Holly Pester’s The Lodgers came out last year. She is also a poet, and this is a little bit more of a “difficult” book — although still readable — where the focus is as much on the language as the plot. It’s a bit Eimear McBride, or James Kelman, a bit Beckett-y, if you like. It’s a sequence of not very secure accommodations, sublets, rentals — a spare room that the landlady uses for an aromatherapy studio in the day, a cheap flatshare, and low-cost rentals. It’s very good at conveying the feeling of anxiety, discomfort, out-of-sorts that being “a lodger” creates. It’s a novel of housing insecurity that gets under your skin.

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @SolHughesWriter.