Section three Looking ahead to 2020-21 At the end of the 2019–20 reporting year, the UK went into ‘lockdown’ in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Citizens were told to stay at home and work from home where possible. Visits to closed detention facilities were also suspended. Lockdown measures created difficulties for NPM members' monitoring activities and posed significant risks to detainees. The NPM engaged in multiple pieces of joint work in the first few weeks of the outbreak (see ‘COVID-19’, p.12). Much of our cross-member work focused on how the NPM could continue to carry out its mandate to prevent torture and ill-treatment in the context of COVID-19. Indeed, the NPM recognises that the need for independent monitoring and oversight is of crucial importance at a time when restrictive measures are enacted in places of detention, which have the potential to greatly impact the human rights of detainees. To reinforce the preventive focus and ensure a human rights-based approach is fully integrated into its monitoring work, the NPM will also carry out a thematic project on prevention in 2020–21. For this project, the NPM will incorporate authoritative written materials on prevention from human rights bodies, such as the SPT, relevant stakeholders and experts into advisory guidance and training for NPM members to use. The NPM will also respond to the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture’s report to the UK NPM. We will do this in collaboration with the NPM membership and examine the areas of the report that will be a useful basis for future work. We will continue to engage with the SPT Secretariat on this work, to help us improve in our work to prevent torture and ill-treatment. In 2020–21, the NPM will take forward its work on COVID-19 as a priority. In particular, we hope to produce a comprehensive report on the impact of COVID-19 across places of detention in the UK later in the year. We envisage that this report will capture the key human rights concerns for people in detention, which have been gathered through members’ on-site visits, inspections and remote monitoring methods. The report may also showcase some of the good practice in places of detention to manage and mitigate the risk of COVID-19 for detainees. 79