LIKE every other trade union leader in Britain, I’m looking forward very much to the first TUC conference in 15 years under a Labour government.

A decade-and-a-half of cruel Tory austerity has devastated our public services — and prisons are no exception.

The overcrowding crisis has been all over the news but, as I wrote in these pages last month, this is just the tip of the prisons iceberg.

My members must cope daily with an escalating vicious circle of ultra-violence and lost experience, which has led to a collapse in morale and staff retention.

Rehabilitation is non-existent — in fact, many people leave prison more traumatised, more criminalised and more drug-addicted than when they arrived.

This is madness. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Prison Officers Association (POA) is committed to working with the new Labour government to rebuild our broken prison service but this task will be made much more difficult by the draconian strike ban on my union for the past 30 years.

This ban allows prison service management and government ministers to exploit my members with impunity, knowing there is no way for their union to fight back apart from costly court action.

That is why we have tabled TUC conference motion 3: “Repeal Section 127 Criminal Justice Public Order Act 1994.”

Section 127 is the notorious law that makes it illegal to “induce” a prison officer “to take (or continue to take) any industrial action” — which in 2019 led to the High Court fining the POA £210,000 and the national chair and me threatened by Tory government lawyers with imprisonment, simply for protecting my members from danger.

As motion 3 explains: “This pernicious piece of legislation should and must be repealed given that there are no adequate compensatory mechanisms in place for resolving local and national disputes or effective mechanisms for resolving pay.”

In 2015, the Scottish government enshrined in law the right of prison officers to strike — and the sky hasn’t fallen in! Instead, industrial relations in Scotland are better than ever.

Prison officers are a disciplined service, they sign the Official Secrets Act and they are loyal to the crown — in other words, they are the last people to engage in industrial conflict, except as a last resort.

Banning prison officers from taking industrial action is part and parcel of running prisons on the cheap, but it is obvious this mentality has led directly to the many crises now plaguing the service.

Another major concern of my union is about mental health provision in prisons as a consequence of years of Tory austerity.

Prisons are being used as so-called “places of safety” for people who are mentally unwell, with prisoners held in prison for an average of 85 days before being transferred to secure hospitals for important medical interventions.

As our conference motion 46 — “Mental illness in prisons” — points out, “this leads to appalling levels of distress for some of the most unwell, with nurses and prison officers suffering real harm as a result of violence against them and responding to an increasing number of deaths in custody.”

Our motion calls for the TUC “to campaign for properly funded health interventions in our communities that deal with mental health issues and divert people away from prison,” which “must include an increase in the number of regional secure beds delivered by NHS providers.”

Along with a crisis-ridden prison estate, Labour has inherited the last government’s £4 billion prison-building budget.

Although this has been earmarked for a new generation of privately run mega-prisons, there is no reason the government can’t instead use some of this money to build more public-sector secure hospitals that can actually address criminality and mental health problems effectively.

And while it’s at it, why doesn’t the government use this Budget to address the appalling scandal of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences, which New Labour introduced in 2005 and were abolished in 2012 — but not retrospectively, meaning that almost 3,000 people are still locked up because of these indefinite torture sentences.

With ministers worried that a resentencing exercise for these prisoners — which the Commons justice select committee called “the only way to address the unique injustice caused by the IPP sentence” — might put public safety at risk, why not build a small number of IPP prisons that are a cross between a Category D open prison and a secure hospital, flooded with therapeutic resources to prepare prisoners properly for release?

A decade-and-a-half of Tory failure has led us to the brink of disaster in our prisons.

The POA stands ready to play its part in fixing this but, if Labour is serious about a spirit of partnership, it must give our members back their basic industrial rights and listen to this union about urgent priorities across the prison estate.

We urge all TUC delegates to vote for these two motions so the labour movement can maximise pressure on this government to bring about these crucial changes.

Steve Gillan is the general secretary of the POA.