A PRISON in Cheshire has seen its performance rating drop.

The performance of HMP Styal has been graded as 'serious concern', new figures released by the Ministry of Justice have shown.

It is one of two prisons to see its rating drop from 2019-2020*, when it was said to be 'acceptable', although it is worth noting a new framework was introduced for 2022-2023 (spanning from April 1 to March 31).

The Annual Performance Rating's were figured out by reviewing various performance measures, including security and stability, training, skills and work, drug and alcohol addiction, and family, accommodation and readjustment to society.

Also published this week was the Annual Digest, which shows that across the past year, there was an average of 382 inmates at Styal, a significant drop from the 460 average pre-Covid.

As such, there has also been a drop in the number of prisoners being held in overcrowded accommodation, from 25 to 18.

The figures have revealed there were five 'escape offences' between April 2022 and 2023, compared to two in 2019-2020.

All of these incidents are classified as 'temporary release failures'.

This occurs when a prisoner fails to adhere to any condition set out in a Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL), which allow prisoners to be temporarily released for specific activities which cannot be provided in prison.

Just one of these five incidents involved the prisoner failing to return, with the other four breaching the ROTL for things such as robbery, drug offences, criminal damage and arson.

The data also shows there were 59 protests at Styal in the last year, more than double the 27 incidents in the year up to March 31 2020.

Four of these involved barricades, with the rest classified as 'incidents at height', which involves things such as prisoners climbing over bars, on the roof, or on the netting.

The amount of contraband found at Styal has also been revealed.

In total there were 154 drug finds over the course of the year, down from 296 in 2019-2020, as well as 15 alcohol finds, 20 tobacco and 19 weapons, compared with 16, 71 and 29 respectively.

There were also 35 finds involving mobile phones, chargers, sim cards, memory cards and other digital or mobile phone-related items, down from 185 pre-Covid.

* The MoJ report states that comparisons cannot be made to 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 due to Covid