The Prison Service needs a national database for security information, according to the public inquiry into the racist killing of Zahid Mubarek by his cellmate.

The Home Office was first alerted to the need for such a system in a 1995 report, but there has been little progress.

The Mubarek inquiry found failures in the flow of information to be a key factor in the murder at Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution in 2000.

‘At the heart of it all was a catastrophic breakdown in communications,’ said inquiry chairman Mr Justice Keith.

The report was broadly positive about the National Offender Management Information System (Nomis) due to be introduced across the prison and probation services by next year.

‘Nomis… will eliminate many of the problems associated with the current procedures,’ say the report’s authors.

But security information is not included in the first phase of Nomis. At the moment, security files are held on an institution-by-institution basis, using either paper records or a standalone IT system known as 5X5.

‘The real problem is that 5X5 systems have the drawback today they had in 2000: they are not networked,’ says the report.

The 1995 Learmont review of prison security called for a national security database for prisons, but although 39 institutions have now been upgraded to the 5X5 system there is still no communication between them.

Butler senior research analyst Mike Davis says the Prison Service’s huge financial and organisational problems have distracted attention. ‘The Prison Service is in near-crisis and in that situation there just cannot be strategic IT development,’ he said.

The Home Office says it has ‘accepted in principle’ the call for a national security system.

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