Prison service rebuked for exposing prisoners to dangerous levels of cancer-causing gas
The prison service is facing a rare Royal Censure, the highest possible sanction against a government body, for exposing prisoners and staff to dangerous levels of a cancer-causing gas.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has criticized HMPPS for failing to manage radon exposure at HMP Dartmoor in Devon, leaving hundreds of people exposed to radiation levels above the legal limit.
After repeated warnings, the prison service finally decided to take action to release people at the end of 2023, moving all inmates out of the Victorian prison by August 2024. Hundreds of former prisoners and staff have joined a class-action lawsuit against the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), with former prisoners and staff saying: Independent They were left in the dark about their exposure.
The HSE announced on Wednesday that it planned to issue a Royal Reprimand to the prison service over the scandal. This is the maximum sanction available to the regulator and is equivalent to allowing criminal charges.
Following the reprimand, a formal hearing will be held to confirm the reprimand. The last time the regulator issued such a dire warning was in 2022, after a Royal Marines soldier drowned while taking part in a training exercise at Tregantle Beach in Cornwall.
The HSE said it was first informed by the prison service at Dartmoor in February 2023 of suspected overexposure to radon gas, despite measurements in 2020 showing unacceptably high levels of the toxic, naturally occurring gas in the prison.
The government is still paying around £4m a year for the unusable prison after authorities signed a 25-year £100m lease in 2022. The fiasco was condemned as a “catastrophic failure” by the government’s public spending watchdog, while officers desperate to find prison places were accused of acting in a “blind panic”.
Antonia Romeo, currently the head of the civil service, was the most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Justice from 2021 to 2025.
The prison service was last reprimanded in 2020 after nine police officers were injured by a petrol bomb during a training exercise.
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