“A system stuck in decline: failures pile up, reality falls short of rhetoric, and meaningful change remains elusive”
The 2025 national annual report has been published this June 2026. It covers an assessment of the adult prison and youth estate and reports that Independent Monitoring Boards from across the country have found a consistent and deeply troubling picture: long standing failures have not been resolved but, instead are becoming standard presentations of a situation. instead being compounded. Many of the most serious concerns identified in this report mirror those raised repeatedly in IMB annual reports over the past decade.