Healthcare for prisoners at HMP Swansea and two other Welsh jails is running £4.8m short, MPs have warned, after the funding pot meant to cover it was left frozen for more than a decade.
A committee of MPs found that the money the UK Government sends to Wales for prisoner healthcare has not risen since 2014 — and has quietly lost almost a third of its value since.
The finding comes in Jagged Justice, a report on prisons and rehabilitation in Wales published this month by the House of Commons Welsh Affairs Committee.
It is the same inquiry that branded the stalled Swansea women’s centre in Cockett an “unacceptable” delay.
The healthcare money is a single transfer covering three prisons — HMP Swansea, HMP Cardiff and HMP Usk & Prescoed.
It was set at £2.5m in 2014 and has stayed there ever since, even as costs and prisoner numbers have climbed.
Adjusted for inflation, that £2.5m is now worth just £1.9m in real terms, according to analysis by the House of Commons Scrutiny Unit.
To match what it could buy in 2014, the transfer would need to stand at around £3.4m today.
The gap is stark when set against what the care actually costs.
Healthcare at HMP Swansea alone cost just under £2.47m in 2024/25, figures from Swansea Bay University Health Board show.
Across all three prisons, the bill came to more than £7.25m — leaving a shortfall of £4.8m between the frozen transfer and the real cost.
The committee said prisoner populations in Wales have “higher, more complex and more concentrated” health needs than people in the community, making the squeeze harder to absorb.
It has called on the UK Government to revise the funding formula and uplift the transfer in line with inflation.
The report also lays bare wider strains at HMP Swansea.
In the 12 months before inspectors visited, around a third of prisoners leaving the jail were released either homeless or into unstable, temporary accommodation on their first night out.
It is a problem with real consequences. The committee heard that people released from prison into homelessness are twice as likely to reoffend.
Locally, one response has been the conversion of the former central police station on Alexandra Road into 68 rooms of supported accommodation, known as Llys Glas.
The building is owned by social housing landlord Codi, while Swansea Council runs the on-site support service — an arrangement designed to move people out of bed-and-breakfast placements and bring help together under one roof.
Among those it supports are people recently released from prison, with the council working alongside the probation service to place former inmates and link them to the help they need.
The committee’s findings on resettlement chime with concerns it raised about Welsh probation more widely, with the Swansea and Neath Port Talbot service rated “requires improvement” earlier this year.
Time out of cell at HMP Swansea also varied sharply, the report found — from around seven hours a day for those in full-time work down to as little as 45 minutes for new arrivals.
Inspectors have long warned that prisoners kept locked up cannot take part in the education, training and work that help cut reoffending.
The report flagged cross-border problems too, with Swansea Bay health bosses describing difficulties accessing the medical records of patients registered with English GPs when they arrive in custody.
The health board told MPs that things would improve “if there was one single system or there were more systems which communicated with each other.”
HMP Swansea is one of five prisons in Wales, four of them in the south, and one of three covered by the frozen healthcare transfer.
The committee’s wider verdict was that justice in Wales is held back by overcrowded prisons, staffing pressures and UK Government policy that does not always fit the country’s particular needs.
It is not the first time MPs on the committee have raised the alarm over a Welsh prison. In March, the same committee warned that plans to expand Bridgend’s HMP Parc could “risk lives” after 17 men died there in a single year.
For now, the committee wants ministers to start with the money — uprating a healthcare transfer that, on its own figures, has been falling behind for over a decade.
