A prison threatened with privatisation has been given a stay of execution.

Ford Open Prison governor Fiona Radford expected to hear last month whether the Home Office would invite private bids to run the jail near Arundel.

The warning followed Government concerns about the number of absconders, failed drug tests and lack of work for prisoners.

In the Prison Service's quarterly assessments, Ford is currently ranked at level two - meaning it is open to the threat of performance testing at any time.

This would force the current governors to convince the Home Office they were better placed to run the jail than private security firms such as Group 4 or Securitas.

If the Government decided Ford could not manage itself, the jail would become the tenth in the UK to become privately run.

Ms Radford has been praised for making improvements since taking over last November.

She has reduced the proportion of positive drug tests from 29.2 per cent last December to 12.5 per cent in March.

She also wants to increase inmates' working hours after last month's Prison Service annual report showed Ford demanded 37.7 hours of purposeful activity a week - fewer than any other open jail.

The Argus revealed last December how prisoners were clambering over a broken picket fence to stock up on alcohol at the nearby Tesco store in Littlehampton.

We also reported that 50 prisoners who had absconded since 1998 remained at large.

Last year, 91 inmates left and did not return, more than five times as many as in 1994.

The Prison Service launched a review of Ford at the start of this year.

It set a series of performance improvements to be introduced within 12 months.

It then told Ms Radford the jail faced possible performance testing.

Ms Radford told The Argus in June that she had been warned to expect a decision by the end of the following month.

However, a Home Office spokesman today said: "No decision has yet been made and there is no date for one.

"Any prison at level two is underperforming against our expectations and is a potential candidate for performance-testing."

If formally chosen for performance testing, Ford would be given four months to produce an improvement plan and a further two months for it to be evaluated.

The last two jails put through the test, Liverpool and Dartmoor, persuaded the Prison Service to keep management in-house.

Ms Radford has insisted she will resist privatisation, while the Prison Officers' Association fears major job cuts if Ford is contracted out.

The annual report showed Ford prisoners failed 23.4 per cent of drug tests last year, better than only two equivalent jails. However, there were no serious assaults on staff or inmates.