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© Copyright, National Preventive Mechanism 2025.

UK NPM 16th Annual Report highlights conditions that fall short of human rights standards

Published:

The UK National Preventive Mechanism has today published its 2024-25 Annual Report, highlighting risks of inhuman and degrading treatment of people in UK detention settings. This includes children and adults deprived of liberty under mental health and mental capacity laws, as well as individuals detained in immigration detention, prisons, and police and court custody.

The report warns that systemic failures continue to undermine efforts of many dedicated staff to uphold people’s dignity, raising concerns about potential breaches to the international prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The report identifies a wide range of issues, including:

  • Institutionalisation and closed cultures in care settings
    People with a learning disability, and autistic people, continue to be detained in hospitals, even when their deprivation of liberty offers no therapeutic benefit. Long stays in institutional settings can erode connections with family and friends, and restrict basic freedoms to make everyday choices and decisions about treatment. Closed cultures (cultures where it is unlikely that many outsiders go in, CQC 2022) in health and social care risk normalising poor practice and perpetuating harm. 
  • Overcrowding in physically deteriorating prisons
    The ongoing capacity crisis has led to prisoners being held in cramped, dilapidated facilities, with insufficient living space and little privacy. At one prison in Scotland, prisoners could not access daily showers, while at another some temporarily had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. Despite staff efforts to support an increasingly complex population, the mental health crisis in prisons is acute and worsening.
  • Increasingly crowded immigration detention
    The number of people detained for immigration purposes has risen, and the UK still has no statutory time limit on detention. Pre-deportation detention should only be used in exceptional cases and for the shortest possible time, yet some individuals remain detained for over a year. Indefinite detention has severe consequences for health and wellbeing, contributing to depression, self-harm and increased violence in an already very challenging environment.

Sherry Ralph, Chair of the UK NPM, said:

“This report highlights concerning and avoidable conditions that affect so many in the UK. These are not new concerns. They are the same patterns of systemic failure identified over more than a decade. This must stop.

Domestically, the UK NPM’s collective voice has influenced key legislative consultations and inquiries across all four nations of the UK, providing evidence-based recommendations on mental health law reform, equality strategies, and children’s justice and sentencing. We will send the report to Government Ministers and committees and seek further assurances that necessary changes will be made.

For the first time, we now have the NPM reporting dashboard, which allows us to track the thousands of recommendations made to improve treatment and conditions of people deprived of their liberty in the UK every year.“

While debate continues over the application of the European Convention of Human Rights in the UK, the report is a reminder that the everyday rights and dignity of people in care homes, mental health units, places of immigration detention and justice settings depend on these protections.  It is important for governments to uphold these protections to meet obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture.

To learn more about these and other findings, read the UK NPM Annual Report 2024-25.