The prison service is facing a rare Crown Censure – the maximum sanction possible against a government body – for exposing prisoners and staff to dangerous levels of cancer-causing gas.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) slammed the HMPPS for failing to manage radon exposure at HMP Dartmoor, in Devon, leaving hundreds exposed to radiation levels above the legal limit.
The prison service finally decided to take action to evacuate people at the end of 2023 after repeated warnings and, by August 2024, had moved all inmates out of the Victorian-age prison. Hundreds of former inmates and staff have now joined a class action lawsuit against the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), with former prisoners and officers telling The Independent they were left in the dark about their exposure.
The HSE announced on Wednesday that it intended to issue the prison service with a Crown Censure over the scandal. That is the maximum sanction available to the regulator and the equivalent of authorising criminal charges.
Following the decision to issue the Censure, a formal hearing will take place to confirm it. The last time the regulator issued such a severe warning was in 2022 after a Royal Marine recruit drowned while taking part in a training exercise at Tregantle Beach, Cornwall.
The HSE said it was first notified by the prison service of suspected overexposure to radon gas at Dartmoor in February 2023, despite measurements from 2020 showing the prison had unacceptably high levels of the toxic, naturally occurring gas.
The government is still paying around £4m a year for the unusable prison after officials signed a £100m 25-year lease in 2022. The fiasco has been condemned by the government’s public spending watchdog as a “catastrophic failure”, while civil servants desperate for prison space have been accused of acting in a “blind panic”.
Antonia Romeo, who is now the head of the civil service, was the most senior civil servant in the MoJ from 2021 to 2025.
The prison service was last issued with a Censure in 2020 after nine officers sustained injuries when they were petrol bombed during a training exercise.
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