It is that logic that perhaps explains why there are now only 42,000 staff in the National OffenderManagement Service in england and wales, while there were 19,000 back in 2010. But the logic of cutting prisons has perhaps reached a limit. The pressure of fewer staff in overcrowded jails has seen violence rise towards staff, other prisoners or in the form of self harm. Bad things are happening in ourjails, and its no surprise the president of the Prison Governors Association has written an open letter attacking the governments management of prisons. Heres elaine dunkley. Violence and rioting, volatility has gripped prisons in england and wales. Run. The pressure in our Prison Service building for staff and inmates. Get down. A breakdown in Law And Order caused by a shortage of staff and a growing Prison Population. A toxic mix according to the Prison Governors Association. Attacks on prison staff and drugs academic increasing concern around Mental Health and overcrowding, resources and rehabilitation, major issues for the Prison Service, and many are warning the system is at breaking point. Earlier this week specialist teams known as Tornado Units were called into a prison in hertfordshire following a riot, and it did not stop there, in wiltshire there was also disturbances which resulted in violence against staff. What i would suggest the Secretary Of State does is very seriously consider an appeal to staff who have left recently, experienced staff, through voluntary exit schemes, to create a task force to go back into those prisons causing most concern and get back control and create a regime and create stability. If that is insufficient armour i would suggest that you need extra resources sent into prison, simply to stabilise them short term and you could consider using the army for that for example. It is a very radical measure, controversial and it carries risk, but the risks of doing nothing are simply too high in my view, to not at least consider exceptionally and for initial period time getting resources onto the landing is to restore control. There has been a sharp rise in Prison Violence the latest figures show nearly 27,000 assaults in prisons in the year to march, 20 more than last year. This includes more than 7000 attacks on staff equating to 20 each day. There has to be some humility frankly from government to say that we made a catastrophic mistake in reducing staff so far so fast, and there is a widespread instability in prisons. Unless it is tackled, i really do fear that we are going to see a member of staff killed on duty. Recruitment and retaining prison staff is a major problem. Over the last 12 months there has been a net increase of just 25 officers, meanwhile the Prison Population in england and wales is growing. You have worked with prisoners and ex offenders for more than 20 years, how bad is the situation . Possibly the worst it has been, i think, for probably 30 years, also. Mark blake is pushing for urgent reform, something he has been calling for since the strangeways riots in the 90s and he believes too many are being put behind bars. The violence is a symptom of the reductions we have had in prison staff and the amount of time people are being locked in their cells and the deterioration in terms of Mental Health that has contributed, we need to address the issue of groups of people who are in the system who we can divert elsewhere. We would highlight women, the womens Prison Population is at an all time high, for the last 20 years, and people with Mental Health problems, we need to do much more. How long will Prison Reform take . From prison staff to the inmates locked away, be problems are clear to see but those caught in a system that needs urgent rehabilitation. Im joined now by paula harriot, who spent four years in jail for supplying drugs and she now works hands on with people in prison for the organisation revolving doors. How have you seen it change, in the last 5 10 years . We have seen the impact of having less staff and more people in prison is Billy Impacting on the ability to deliver any rehabilitation in prisons, and it has become about warehousing people and warehousing people who come into that prison unwell. Mental health problems, substance misuse problems. All sorts of challenges for rehabilitation, what does that mean, more hours in a cell . It means locked in a cell. How long . We have seen cases of people being locked up the entire weekend because of staff shortages, from friday until monday. That is simply traumatising for people. Imagine not being able to get out at all and how that plays on your ability to cope with the stress of the sentence, you cant access the phone to phone anybody. You are isolated and how that impacts on your Mental Health. Some people would say, you are in prison, what do you expect, that is what you get when you go to prison. I agree, but the punishment is being deprived of your liberty and i dont think it is being placed in a degrading situation. How does the violence, round . A rather stupid question, but people locked in cells are not going to be getting up to any violence because theres nothing for them to do. The frustration builds and builds and escalates and so when you get out the anger and frustration is absolutely at the tipping point, the boiling point, and then people flare up over things that generally could be managed. In a more, in a different way. Have you witnessed any violence in prisons . I have been working since my own release from prison, ive been working constantly in prisons and directly with people who have been recently released from prison, having lots of contact, and i can see that the breakdown in communication, the breakdown in access to Mental Health services and substance misuse services, and psychological interventions, how Staffing Levels mean people cant get to health care. The one substance people are allowed to misuse is tobacco, the smoking ban is causing a worry. I think that is misjudged. In my information that ive had recently around the smoking ban, it is that people are then using spice. Which is much worse. And they are smoking it with tobacco, that is unadulterated and the impact of that is that it has escalated peoples Mental Health and violence levels. Very briefly, the public want people to be punished. Supplying drugs, they want you to be punished but you got four years. What could we have done to signal disapproval in the way that we have done . I recently spoke to a magistrate about how we can minimise the amount of people that are being sent to prison and her answer was that we need a menu of options for magistrates, that sometimes they bail out of options. They run out of options to support people in the community to look at their Funding Behaviour and they dont have the ability to sentence people to Mental Health treatment and they dont utilise that as much as they could. They dont have the option to direct people to substance misuse treatment orders, and i think we need to have a much more coherent approach to using Community Sentencing to divert people out of the criminaljustice system. Thanks forjoining us. Im joined now by Philip Wheatley formerly director general of the national 0ffender Management Service and also a former director general of hm Prison Service. And the conservative mp dominic grieve, who was Attorney General under the coalition government. Good evening. Would you say it is crisis level in terms of violence and inability to looked after prisons the way you meant . I think it is a crisis in the way that you have seen a tripling in the level of assaults on staff since i left in 2010, it is difficult for staff to do theirjob safely on properly and that makes them likely to back off in the face of that aggression and it makes it difficult to run prisons safely. The level of assaults between prisoners and the extent to which spice has become the drug of choice, and is difficult to deal with, and now a series of incidents, mass disorder, that genuinely should be caught a crisis. And we also have suicide which has doubled since i left and that means prisons are not safe for prisoners and staff and by not doing the job they should be doing in terms of reducing reoffending. We have heard that the state of things, do you recognise that is the state ofjails in england and wales . Yes, i do, the evidence is overwhelming and the problem is we have an overcrowded Prison System and we have failed consistently to face up to that and to accept we have either got to reduce the Prison Population or provide more prisons and more Prison Officers, and while leadership in good prisons can do a great deal to reduce some of those issues, even if you have a shortage of staff, there comes a point where you cant go on doing that. And the message i think the government has got to take, either there has to be more investment and money being spent or we have got to find alternatives to prison is to reduce the Prison Population. We have failed to face up to this, and i get bombarded by people asking for Prison Sentences to be increased or for new offences to be created, which will lead to people being sent to prison, we have a knack in this country of seeing prison as the Final Destination for criminals and insisting that is where they should go, we have one of the highest Prison Populations in europe per head. And we dont have the resources invested in order to do that. This is quite an indictment of your party in government, they have been there seven years and they have been talking the talk. Michael gove said this is appalling, no point trying to minimise attention from the problems, but it hasnt been dealt with, why not . It is an indictment of every single government that has been in office was long as i have been in parliament. This is a long standing problem and in fairness, the present Justice Secretary who is a wise and sensible person has understood some of these issues and in the decisions that have been taken in getting more Prison Officers back, that is a step in the right direction, but it can only be a step, and we put people into prison and unless we have proper training and education programmes, what were actually doing is putting a group of people with Serious Problems and a tendency towards criminality all together in one place. Should we be surprised in those circumstances if we cant deliver the programmes, but in fact they end up misbehaving within the Prison System itself . We heard Philip Aitchison basically saying if you cant get the resources, you need to have the army ready whenever there is disruption, and he thinks there will be quite a bit, are they ready to step in, have we reached that point . That would make the situation worse, in my view, and the prisons ability to handle disorder and two ended without injury is quite considerable, they are skilled in doing it and they have succeeded in doing that, but the army are not trained for that. To deploy them in that role would be folly and to deploy them to supervise wings, when they have had no training, that would be folly, there training is in using lethal force, not in persuading people to do things, and that would make the situation was, but there is a crisis and we do have to deal with it. They have announced there will be more Prison Officers, 3000 extra Prison Officers in england and wales. Will that make the difference that is required . It will help if they can recruit them. Part of the problem is that the pay for Police Officers has been forced down. They earn less than they used to when i was there. That is making the job unattractive in the south east, where the economy is running hot and we have full employment. It is getting difficult to recruit. In my time, it was 2 , but it is running just short of 10 of staff a year of turnover, so you have to recruit hard to stand still. We have to do something about both the attraction and the retention strategy, and sticking doggedly about the government pay strategy looks like its getting in the way of that, particularly in the south east. What happens if we dont put in the extra resources and recruit more Prison Officers . What happens if we do nothing . I think the consequence will be that the Prison System will be run as well as it can be, but it will continue to be a chaotic situation. The rehabilitation we want from the Prison System, that the vast majority of inmates will be coming out after reasonably short periods of time, is going to be lost. It is in our interests to get this right. Coming back to my original point. The greatest driver is overcrowding. As long as we cannot get a grip on this as a society, we will constantly be behind the curve. We are not going to be able to address this issue. I have taken an interest in this subject for 20 years, as long as ive been in parliament, and in that time, these problems have been in the background continuously. And the Prison Population has gone up by a third. Thank you both very much. More news breaking tonight on the tests into Building Cladding and insulation in the wake of the fire at grenfell. Chris cook has been following this whole issue since the day of the fire. Chris, just bring us up to speed with the tests. We heard a lot about Test Failures in the last few weeks. What the government was doing when they had all these failures was auditing the building, trying to work out what Combustible Materials were on buildings across england. They didnt know which combination of materials could be used together safely, because a lot of it will be ok because it will be installed such a way to ensure that fire cant get to it. They are doing six tests to work out what combinations of materials can safely be used. So these are the big six. Forget everything else. What are these tests showing . We have a grid showing what these tests are. Down the left hand side are the types of cladding they are testing. Limited Combustibility Cladding is the most fireproof stuff. Fire retardant cladding is slightly less. The last one is quite combustible. They are doing big tests with those installed alongside plastic foam, for one test, and mineral ball, the insulation. We had the Grenfell Tower combination last week, and that was a complete failure. What we learned tonight is polyethylene Core Cladding and mineral ball also failed the test. That polyethylene Core Cladding is gone, basically. The 193 Tall Buildings across england that have some kind of polyethylene Core Cladding on them will have to be taken down, realistically, because even when you have the safest type of installation, it cannot withstand the fire tests. We have four other boxes to look forward to. In exactly, and we dont know what they are going to say. They might say thats just a little bit has to be changed. Thank you very much. Turmoil in venezuela continues. The Constituent Assembly elected controversially over the weekend, is due to be sworn in any time now. However, the company that provided the electronic Voting System used in the vote said it thinks the governments claims on the huge turnout were exaggerated. Given the opposition were boycotting the vote, it was upon turnout that the legitimacy of the vote depended. Youll have seen last night that Opposition Leaders have been arrested and detained, the eu is thinking about its response probably not sanctions at this stage. But protests in the country continue as it slides into disorder. We can speak to bbc correspondent will grant in caracas. What is the latest, particularly on the swearing in of this Constituent Assembly, which i believe has been a bit late . Thats right. It has been another one of these chaotic, ad hoc days in venezuela, when you wake up and the news moves faster than ordinary people can keep up with. The announcement you mentioned in london by the company that runs the electronic Voting System will have had real shock waves here, because of course the opposition will say that the numbers were inflated, but to have those claims supported by the very people who are counting the vote, or rather operating those systems, gives credibility to them and not to the government. Mr maduro is carrying on regardless, both with swearing in, which we