HMP Stocken Slammed After "Systemic" Tampering With Fire Alarms Leads to Prisoner Death

By Local Democracy Reporter Rutland 

A "systemic" culture of tampering with life-saving fire equipment at HMP Stocken has been exposed by a Rutland coroner following the death of a 42-year-old inmate.

Richard Charles Hunt died from smoke inhalation on July 11, 2025, after setting fire to his single-occupancy cell on the prison’s I Wing. A scathing Regulation 28 "Prevention of Future Deaths" report, issued by Assistant Coroner Miss F. Butler, has now revealed that the alarm meant to alert staff to the blaze had been deliberately sabotaged.

The report details a harrowing timeline in which Mr. Hunt’s cell smouldered for approximately two hours before he was discovered. His rescue was described by the coroner as "fortuitous," occurring only because an officer conducting a check on a different prisoner nearby happened to smell smoke.

While a fault indicator had been triggered on the wing’s control panel two hours earlier, the audible buzzer designed to alert staff to emergencies failed to sound. A subsequent inspection by ADT Alarms found that a rubber glove had been stuffed between the connectors of the control panel to silence the buzzer.

This was not the first time such a failure occurred involving Mr. Hunt. Just four months prior, on March 19, 2025, he had set fire to a cell on K Wing. In that instance:

The Coroner’s investigation suggests the problem is not limited to a single wing but is a prison-wide issue. Inspections across the HMP Stocken estate found, The control panel on L Wing had been vandalised. Units in other wings, including the Segregation Unit, had been "deliberately forced open". A critical lack of central oversight, as wing-level fault panels do not link to the prison’s main Control Room. Miss Butler was blunt in her assessment of the prison's safety protocols: "Maintenance system is futile if staff are going to deliberately tamper with that system to disable the buzzer which is designed to alert them as to risk. This is not an isolated occurrence and is systemic across the HMP Stocken Estate".

The report has been sent to the Governor of HMP Stocken, HM Prison & Probation Service, and the Crown Premises Fire & Safety Inspectorate.

The coroner Butler gave the governor of HMP Stocken until December 3 to respond to her report but two months on from that deadline, she is yet to receive a response.

Click below for full report:

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Richard-Hunt-Prevention-of-future-deaths-report-2025-0498_Published.pdf

In 2021, career criminal Richard Hunt appeared in court and was sentenced to a 10-year prison term followed by an additional five years on licence for a "pre-meditated and cruel" robbery. Targeting a vulnerable toy collector with a brain condition, Hunt used the promise of rare models to gain entry before launching a brutal assault. He struck the victim with a chair, bound his hands, and placed a pillowcase over his head to steal £13,000 funds the victim had painstakingly saved for a cruise. This conviction was merely the latest chapter in a violent history that includes 17 convictions for 43 offences, dating back to 2002. Hunt’s rap sheet reveals a pattern of preying on the vulnerable, including a 2009 incident where he kidnapped a woman at knifepoint and a 2017 mugging at an ATM, marking him as a persistent threat to public safety.