When Calls Cost Dinner

Every week, people in prison in England and Wales are handed a tiny budget and told to

make it stretch. It is not just for snacks. It is the same pot that covers basics: soap,

toothpaste, shampoo, coffee, noodles, paracetamol - and phone credit.

Official policy sets hard weekly limits on private cash that can be spent. For convicted

prisoners, the limit depends on their incentives level: basic, standard or enhanced. The

current national limits, uplifted in April 2025, are £6.00 a week at basic, £21.75 at

standard, and £36.25 at enhanced. People on remand can spend more, but they are

capped too: £30.25 at basic, £66.50 at standard and £72.50 at enhanced.

Then comes the second squeeze: phone calls are priced like a luxury, not a lifeline. In

January 2024, the Ministry of Justice confirmed that calls to UK mobiles from prison

payphones and in-cell phones cost 6.88 pence per minute on weekdays and 4.50 pence

per minute at weekends (with lower rates to landlines). A later FOI summary published in

July 2025 reported a 20% cut from May 2025, bringing weekday mobile calls down to

about 5.5 pence per minute and landlines to about 2.48 pence per minute.

Those numbers look small until you translate them into real life. A single 20-minute call to

a mobile at 5.5 pence per minute costs £1.10. Do that once a day and it is £7.70 a week,

before you have bought toothpaste or shower gel. For someone on the convicted standard

limit (£21.75), that is more than a third of their entire weekly spend.

Pay inside is not designed to soften this. Inside Time reported in April 2025 that average

prisoner pay was £11.62 per week. That means the average wage does not even cover a

daily 20-minute call, let alone food, hygiene and a few extras to make the week bearable.

The Ministry of Justice will point to progress: the PIN phone programme has rolled out

in-cell telephony across 93 prisons, completed in April 2024. The old queue system -

where a wing might share a handful of phones - is being replaced. In theory, that reduces

bullying over phone time and reduces demand for illicit mobiles.

But the cash cap did not modernise with the hardware. A phone in the cell is a prop if the

credit is rationed by design. This is punishment by budget: you can have the phone, but

you cannot afford to use it; you can keep family ties, but only in short, metered bursts.

Article 8 of the Human Rights Act protects the right to respect for private and family life

and correspondence, including communications. It is not absolute, and prisons can

lawfully restrict contact for safety and security. But a blanket financial rationing system is

not a risk assessment. It does not target crime. It targets poverty.

The result is a weekly dilemma with no dignity: ring your kids or buy toothpaste. Call your

solicitor or buy deodorant. Keep the peace in your own head or eat properly. When the

state prices contact like a luxury, it turns family life into a canteen item with a weekly cap.

Key sources: HMPPS, PSI 01/2012 'Manage Prisoner Finance' (reissued 1 April 2025); UK Parliament Written Question

HL1421 (answered 24 Jan 2024); Inside Time (11 July 2025; 1 April 2025); HMPPS Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25

(PIN phones milestone, April 2024); Human Rights Act 1998, Article 8.