Guidance

Swinfen Hall Prison: Families and significant others strategy

Swinfen Hall’s family strategy explains how we support prisoners in our care to develop meaningful and constructive relationships with their family or significant others.

• From: HM Prison and Probation Service and HM Prison Service
• Published: 28 January 2026

Applies to England and Wales

Our commitment to you

Visiting a prison can be a difficult and anxious time for both family and significant others and those sentenced.

Some prisoners will struggle with the impact of losing ties with their family and friends, their freedom and access to their support network when in custody.

It is vital we work together with services both internal and external to maintain relationships to reduce the impact on reoffending.

Government research has shown that people in custody who receive visits from a family member are 39% less likely to reoffend. (Lord Farmer Report 2017).

Positive family contact can act like a comfort blanket for prisoners, it provides them with a support network which can help prevent desistance, drug/alcohol misuse and promote engagement with education skills and work to earn qualifications to be successful in gaining employment on release.

Families are defined as blood relations, legal guardians, friends, and those that have been identified as a next of kin.

Lots of our people have experienced ‘non-traditional’ upbringings and we want to make sure that everyone is included.

What we aim to do

• Support prisoners and families in maintaining good relationships by facilitating family days throughout the year, ensuring they are interactive and meet the needs of our prison population.
• Help improve parenting skills for prisoners and guide them through their children’s educational experiences.
• Provide advice and guidance to families and prisoners, keeping the family-friendly focus.
• Offer support with troubled relationships.
• Reduce / remove barriers to enable family members to visit the prison so they can experience quality visits in a welcoming environment.
• Involve families in resettlement, the sentence planning process and in times of crisis, where appropriate.
• To establish links with local authorities in the support of families and children.
• To better inform and train staff on children and family issues to improve understanding and engagement between staff and prisoners.
• We will develop a strategy to support prisoners who do not get visitors by focusing on ‘no-visits’ and facilitating events every 6 months to support any prisoners who meet the criteria with significant other support and interaction.
• Improve how we identify and work with young adults and care leavers.
• Work more closely together across all departments in HMP/YOI Swinfen Hall to provide greater support for prisoners through our PACT services.

Meet the team

• Governing Governor
• Family and Significant Others Lead - our Head of Reducing Reoffending
• Family and Significant Other Champion - a custodial manager
• Pact Family Engagement Manager
• Family Support Workers (x2)
• Volunteers (x2)

Support and services available at Swinfen Hall

Family engagement work 

Our family support provider, PACT, aims to support the children and families who arrive to visit prisoners, to help enable those families to maintain a healthy relationship and regular contact with an imprisoned family member.

As a team alongside Swinfen Hall staff, PACT work to help children and families to cope with the very difficult experience they are facing, and to try to keep the family together throughout the period of imprisonment.

They help the prisoner continue to be a loving and caring parent, despite being in prison – and for the child to know that they are still loved as much as ever. They have a range of activities which can include special visits for children.

One-to-one case work offered by a family engagement manager will be a service available to prisoners and will contribute towards building strong family ties.

Case work may involve supporting prisoners to rebuild relationships, gain information from their child’s social worker and much more.

Prison offender managers along with keyworkers and partner agency staff will be asked to refer prisoners to the service when necessary.

Services and support that are aimed at the whole family will also be something that will be developed if necessary and needed.

Support for the whole family may include family members meeting with the family engagement manager or volunteers prior to a visit, when they meet family members, they will be able to have support and be sign posted to outside agencies.

Families can meet the staff in the onsite visits centre if there is a need for a confidential discussion.

PACT can also provide support for prisoners who have lost children to adoption, provided appropriate safeguarding measures are followed by facilitating letter writing for prisoners and contact visits where appropriate.

Parenting/relationship courses 

We offer the following help to support the children and families pathway:

• Being Dad course – 2 courses scheduled for this year to be delivered by our chaplaincy team, we have the capacity to offer more if the need is required 
• Family visits organised by the family engagement worker with PACT (12 commissioned for this year) – these are all day visits with activities for all the families to take part in. They can be themed depending on the time of year 
• Video calls to families and significant others 
• Befriending service and support from PACT if prisoners do not receive visits

Our Library service offers:

• Storybook Dads recordings once a month
• bespoke recordings for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Grandparents’ Day
• craft sessions for our men to send their work to their families
• ‘Making a book’ new initiative
• Six book challenge (Reading Ahead)
• The Reading Challenge
• book clubs (library and prisoner-led)
• New Chapters (with National Literacy Trust)
• Books unlocked (established readers’ group) - joint collaborative work with Shannon Trust
• Ten by Ten (creative writing event)
• Dictionaries gifts

Family engagement casework 

Offers support on strengthening and maintaining relationships and re-connecting broken relationships and liaises with social services and acting as a point of contact for child protection.

If you require this support, please speak with our PACT services who facilitate caseload work to support those prisoners in our care.

Family days

Swinfen Hall runs up to 12 family days per year. (This includes some that are adult only.)

If you require any further information on any of our family day events, please speak with the PACT services. (This information is also displayed in our visits hall and is accessible to prisoners on their wings.) 

• Events run from 11am to 3pm on the fourth Thursday of each month. They are an opportunity to enjoy extended time with young members of the family, and they are geared around them.
• We provide craft activities, food play, games, indoor sporting activities, soft play for younger children and books.
• Families enjoy an opportunity to create items for the fathers/brothers/uncles to take items back to the prison with them on occasion, and we take family photographs, which we send to you by email for your personal use.
• An informal buffet is provided for you enjoy as a family during the day.
• These days are by appointment only and children must attend.
• During Family Days, the PACT team will talk with families and prisoners and offer support and guidance. They are also able to signpost you to outside agencies, where appropriate, for more detailed support.
• Photographs will be taken during family days. You will be required to sign a consent form. Photographs are for personal use and will be shared with you following the family day by email.
• Following visits, prisoners will be reminded that they can drop in and talk to PACT staff, and if a family member wishes to talk to the family engagement manager, this will be welcomed.
• We will review prisoners with ‘no visits’ every 6 months, documented on our no visits log. These individuals will have a face-to-face meeting with the Family and Significant Others Champion or appropriate manager, and an event will be arranged for these prisoners to raise awareness of visits, understand their reasons for not having a visit, and offer the appropriate support.

Some of our family days may be themed, for example at Christmas or for any significant events and activities will be created so families can have fun with their loved ones within the prison setting.

Family days are limited, and it is not always possible for each applicant to be successful on a family visits day. We have criteria which prisoners must achieve to be successful in attending family days that is incentivised against behavioural expectations.

If your relative requires further information,  this is provided on the family day application.

We run several of our family days during the school holidays so that education and routine are not disrupted.

We also offer a lifer day which operates in the same way as a family day but is only open to prisoners who are serving life sentences.

There are additional family days offered for those on our Inspires services however this is not managed with support of our PACT services and guidance is available via those on the Inspires service to send to families when events are organised.

Care leavers 

Those with experience of the care system are more likely to have experienced significant trauma and abuse and other disadvantage that can put them more at risk of violence, self-harm and suicide when in prison.

Many also have experiences of being failed by their corporate parents and can come to prison feeling extremely isolated and angry.

Care leavers are entitled to support up until they are 25 years old and linking in with local authorities is vital in supporting care leavers in our care.

We will take guidance from the HMPPS Strategy for Care Experienced People, learning from best practice and lived experiences within the document. The document highlights the importance of linking in with local authorities to enable as much information as possible to given to those within our care.

We are striving to improve our staff’s knowledge and understanding of those that are care experienced at Swinfen Hall.

We appreciate that both prisoners and those wishing to visit prisoners have experienced traumatic events and support is available for those people who require it.

Within the offender management unit, we have ‘care champions’ who can offer specialist support and referral to services designed to help those with experience in the care sector.

Our care leaver lead is the Offender Management Unit - Head of Management Delivery.

How we meet the needs of care-experienced people

People who have experienced care can have greater social, personal and offending related needs, and may need more support. Because of this it’s important for us to quickly identify care leavers and to provide them with the support they need.

Any prisoner aged between 21 and 25 years of age who has been in the care of the local authority (care leavers) is entitled to a personal advisor support from the local authority. Anyone who requires this can obtain the information from the care-experienced team at Swinfen Hall who will be happy to contact the local authority or the dedicated personal advisor.

• We will ensure that anyone who is a care leaver will be offered the support from the local authority.

• All care leavers’ personal advisors can book on to a social visit.

• Personal advisors will receive support from the probation / prison offender managers.

• Swinfen Hall has its own care-experienced team. This is made up of staff and prisoners who meet to discuss support networks available and ideas for future engagement.

Safeguarding measures

At Swinfen Hall we have a safeguarding policy that ensures safeguarding measures are in place for people in our care, vulnerable adults and children.

All adults in need of safeguarding have the right to live their lives free from abuse of any description. All agencies and individuals that have contact with adults in need of safeguarding have a duty to protect them from abuse.

Where abuse is reported to or suspected by any person the response will be prompt and in line with prison service policies.

The prison works as a multi-agency team to meet the needs of prisoners in ensuring that they remain safe.

You can find all safeguarding information on Swinfen Hall’s main GOV.UK page.

For further information about safeguarding measures, please see the HMPPS Child Safeguarding Policy Framework.

What have we achieved?

• Positive feedback about our PACT offer, and provision to visitors creating a welcoming experience.
• Visit from regional leads where we received positive feedback regarding our visits processes and facilities.
• Held our first visitor and prisoners’ forums regarding visits.
• Family days have been taking place monthly within the prison.
• The establishment held its first annual celebrating success event.
• We have re-vamped the reducing reoffending meeting to focus on the children and family’s pathway, enabling us to review our offer and set appropriate actions to improve the family and significant other offer to our prisoners based on their need.
• The head of reducing reoffending and the families and significant others champion and pathway lead continue to meet with families in the visits centre and during family days to discuss any concerns they may have about visiting. Any feedback from meetings is discussed at our monthly meetings with PACT.
• We have completed regular visitor surveys where we have identified the needs of the people in our care and what we can do to improve their time at and how to involve their significant others in the journey.
• We now provide hot refreshments for visitors in our visitors’ centre.
• We have held our first ‘no-visit’ event in July for prisoners who have not had access to a visit since being at Swinfen Hall due to lack of family and significant other support.

You said, we did

You said	We Did	What we are continuing to do
We would like hot drinks in the visitors’ centre.	We now provide hot refreshments in our visitors’ centre.	Working on improving our catering services in the ‘Swinny Tea Bar’ in our visits hall.
The visits hall needs refreshing.	We have re-carpeted and re-painted the visits hall.	We are replacing the furniture in this reporting year.
The queue system does not work; staff are not enforcing the procedure.	We have trained our staff on understanding the importance of managing the queue system.	Embed consistency for those visiting Swinfen Hall.
We would like a better selection of games in the hall.	We have purchased more board games and cards which are accessible to all.	Review our facilities and offer in the visits hall.
Improve the food options in the visits hall.	We have created a process however we are awaiting our bistro to open to enable us to offer hot food, freshly cooked based on a new ordering system.	Open the bistro and start this process in this reporting year.

How will we measure our success?

• Prisoner family needs questionnaire/surveys. 

• Prisoner consultative committee. 

• Reducing reoffending meetings. 

• HM Inspectorate of Prisons inspection reports. 

• Prisoner Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) questionnaires. 

• Rehabilitative culture meetings. 

• Visitors Advisory Board. 

• Safer Prisons team to invite families or significant others to Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork (ACCT) reviews or provide palliative care support. 

• PACT monthly meetings with Head of Reducing Reoffending. 

• Performance measure indicators.

Published 28 January 2026