A senior prisoner manager accused of passing unauthorised information to a convicted criminal told a court that he does not believe it was illegal.

Peter Nichols is charged with carrying out computer checks on prison systems between November and December 2021 for convicted criminal Gareth Casella.

Nichols, 49, also asked his 42-year-old wife Jessica Nichols, who was head of security at young offender institution HMP Feltham, to carry out an unauthorised check herself in November 2021, which she did.

The check was on Casella’s friend, Charles Kipping, on behalf of Kipping’s mother who was worried her son may have gone to prison.

Asked if he was concerned about breaking any prison policies by giving Casella the information, Nichols told the jury “no, absolutely not”.

Giving evidence at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, he said: “Because it was a welfare check, it wasn’t giving out any personal information, any personal details – just to stop a mother worrying, to know her son was safe.

Disturbance at Feltham young offender institute
Jessica Nichols was working at HMP Feltham (Kirsty O’Connor/PA)

“The effect that custody has … I’ve seen 11 suicides, lots of incidents, when you talk to families and parents the worry they have can be immense, so I could assure a mother that her son’s safe, he’s in Wandsworth Prison. I don’t think that’s illegal, just putting a mother’s mind at rest.”

At the time of the alleged offences Nichols was governor-grade staff as the head of business assurance at Wormwood Scrubs.

He was two rungs below the governor of the prison, did not have to wear uniform to work and had “global access” to NOMIS software that allowed him to search for any prisoner in any jail in England and Wales.

Nichols said there are more than 100 prison policies but staff “certainly weren’t tested on them or expected to have a working knowledge of them”.

He told jurors that Casella went to school with his wife and he first met him around 2014.

Years later, Casella carried out work at the couple’s house as a qualified electrician.

One day he came home from work early to find Casella “sitting in the garden with his head in his hands”.

“He divulged that he had been arrested a week or so previously for drink driving, he was due in court the following day,” Nichols said.

Casella reportedly said his father was unwell, described his ongoing break-up “in quite great detail”, and said to Nichols “I haven’t told anyone else, I can’t talk to anyone else about this.”

The prison manager told jurors that he attended Casella’s Kingston Crown Court hearing in support, and flagged a conflict of interest to his line manager stating that “I do intend to visit him” in prison.

A few days after Casella was sentenced, Nichols messaged a colleague in the prison service saying “Hello mate, if you get time can you look at the case notes of Gareth Casella, my mate at wanno (HMP Wandsworth), just want to know he’s OK”.

Nichols was told that there had been no recent reports on Casella and “staff were aware it’s his first time in prison”.

Justifying the check, Nichols said Casella “was so low” and “I was worried about him, I hadn’t heard from him”.

On release he became “an ongoing support mechanism” to Casella, Nichols said, adding that he would telephone him once a week to ask “how he was getting on”.

On November 8 2021, Casella called Nichols and said his friend’s mother was “upset, anxious and worried” because she could not contact her son and feared he may have gone to prison.

Casella reportedly asked Nichols if there was “anything he could do to find him” and Nichols said he would try.

Nichols then called his wife, who was at Feltham Young Offender Institution where she worked, to ask if she could log into the NOMIS system and search for Kipping.

He had access to NOMIS at home but said he asked his wife to do it because he “would have been doing the kids’ dinner, so it would have been easier to call Jess rather than go to the front of the house to get it up on the system”.

Casella called Nichols at 5.41pm, who contacted his wife two minutes later.

She had logged out of the NOMIS system by 5.45pm but there were no updates on Kipping.

Nichols said he told Casella that he could not find his friend and then carried out further NOMIS checks from Wormwood Scrubs the following day.

The court heard he searched NOMIS at 7.43am, 2.16pm, 3pm, 5.25pm, and 6.13pm, by which point he had located Kipping in prison and passed that on to Casella.

He told the court that Kipping’s mother could have got an update through another system but it could take 10 days.

Nichols added that he did not see it as providing confidential information to a convicted criminal. He said: “I don’t recognise him (Casella) as an ex-offender, he’s an electrician.”

Peter and Jessica Nichols, from Chertsey, Surrey, are charged with causing a computer to perform a function with intent to secure unauthorised access to data contrary to the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

Peter Nichols has denied 10 counts of the offence and Jessica Nichols denied one count.

Casella, from Egham, Surrey, has also denied 10 counts of the same offence and one charge of failure to comply with a notice.