Recruitment drives by UK Border Force have led to prisons near ports and airports finding it difficult to retain staff, according to Prison Service data.
According to senior prison officers, younger members of staff were most likely to quit; almost half of officers (47%) who left in 2022 had been in the role for under three years, and more than a quarter (25%) left after less than a year.
Employees in south-east England were most likely to leave prisons because of recruitment drives from the Border Force and police, said Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons. But lack of management support, staff shortages and antisocial hours also played a part.
Exit interviews also suggested that younger staff at prisons did not like handing over their mobile phones every day. “A lot of these young kids now that we employ, they just don’t like being away from their mobile phone,” one prison officer told the Guardian.
About 10,000 people work for the Border Force, with most in frontline roles at points of entry across the UK. Several hundred personnel have been recruited since 2020 to deal with post-Brexit border controls.
Taylor said: “What we’re seeing now, particularly in places such as Kent, Surrey, Sussex, we’re seeing people being lost, or certainly under pressure from Border Force and these sorts of organisations. So jails such as Maidstone, Elmley, Swaleside and Lewes are all under pressure. You’ve got Gatwick Airport nearby as well.”
Border Force roles are considered to be less stressful than working in the UK’s antiquated prisons, according to many with oversight of both services. This seems to be outweighing the fact that salaries in the Border Force are lower than those in prisons, with new recruits paid as little as £21,431, compared with more than £30,000.
Border Force recruiters find prison officers to be good candidates because they have similar skills and can move within the civil service on a “level transfer”, which means candidates can move over with their existing salaries and pensions.
A spokesperson for the ISU, the union for borders, immigration and customs, told the Guardian: “Often we get prison officers who have been injured on the job, perhaps carrying out [some] sort of physical restraint, or officers who have developed mental health issues because of the stresses of working in jails.”
The Ministry of Justice said: “We have committed to hiring up to 5,000 prison officers across public and private prisons by the mid-2020s.”
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