Attempts to stop prison drone drug deliveries hampered by crumbling Victorian walls

Weak and crumbling walls in Victorian prisons are hampering attempts to halt drones from delivering drugs and weapons to inmates.

Plans to install tougher netting and window grilles to stop drones from entering have been hampered because the walls have been unable to take the extra weight, prison governors said.

Recent attempts to fix anti-drone netting at HMP Pentonville, the Victorian prison in north London, were stalled after they found that the bricks were too soft, sources have said.

Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, said last month that the Prison Service had “ceded the airspace above many of our prisons to serious organised crime”, resulting in a “national security threat”.

The number of incidents at prisons involving drones has risen by more than 1,000% over four years, with gang members able to fly packages carried by drones direct to cell windows. The packages are then retrieved by inmates with a hook.

Their use has become so ubiquitous that inspectors have found packages weighing more than 15kg, delivering goods such as weight loss and hair loss drugs, anabolic steroids and fast food.

Nets can be fixed to walls to catch the drones by snagging their propellers, while fixed window grilles can be used to stop prisoners from pulling packages into their cells.

But Tom Wheatley, the president of the Prison Governors Association, said measures to stop drones were not being introduced quickly enough and faced structural problems.

“Physical measures such as netting, wires and grilles are the preferred option for preventing contraband getting into prisons. They make it almost impossible,” he said.

“In some prisons, there are concerns that such measures put extra weight on the walls and the weight can be too much for the buildings.”

HMP Pentonville, a category B prison which holds about 1,200 inmates, is undergoing a significant overhaul after Taylor issued an urgent notification in July.

Some netting was installed across the exercise yard several years ago. But plans to install stronger mesh across other parts of the prison were stalled, senior sources said, after engineers found that the walls could not hold it at the necessary tension.

An industry insider blamed the softness of ‘London stock brick’ which was used to build the prison in 1842.

“Not only are the yellowy bricks soft, but the mortar between them is very old. It is very difficult to fix ropes and meshes as a result,” they said.

“To get over the problem, you have to design steel brackets and support that share the load, and that can be difficult to do in such restricted places. It is not an easy task,.”