Re: Legal Visits at HMP Pentonville

Visit time Table - April - May 2025

Jason Lartey (our Vice-President) had a productive meeting with the Head of Operations last week.

Your concerns and frustrations were shared and taken on board by the prison, and we are pleased to say that you should notice improvements in the coming weeks.

The problems have been attributed to a lack of staff to deal with the volume of emails received by the legal visits team. Staffing has been increased and may increase further in the future.

You should now be receiving an auto-response to say that you will receive a response to your request within 72 hours. To assist with email traffic, it would be helpful to avoid chasing until this period has elapsed.

Another factor is that different wings have different visit dates. Please see attached visits timetable for April/May. We appreciate that this will not always be possible, but if you can find out from your client which wing they are on this should assist.

It was noted that there are times where we do not attend scheduled legal visits. There will of course be many reasons for this, not least the poor booking system, but if you could please make every effort to attend your visits or cancel as soon as you know you are unable to attend.

To streamline things further in the future, there was a discussion about a centralised booking system to enable us to book legal visits ourselves. We understand that this works well for social visits, and we will continue to liaise with the Head of Operations to urge them to make use of good technology to improve the system. We would of course need to be mindful of availability and only book the slots we need.

 HMP Pentonville are also going to look at better ways to add interpreters to existing visits so that this does not impede the process. We will update further about this in due course.

Work on this important issue is ongoing, so please do let us know your experiences so that we can feed back to the Head of Operations at HMP Pentonville.

Best wishes,

Casey

LCCSA President