PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Prison Capacity Strategy - 12 December 2024 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

Before we come to the statement on the Government’s 10-year prison capacity strategy, I note that it was published yesterday, the day after Justice questions in the House. This timing was unfortunate, as publishing it a day or two earlier would have given hon. Members an opportunity to put topical questions to Ministers on the new strategy, so I am very pleased that the Minister has come to the House today to make a statement.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I hear your comments. With your permission, I will make a statement on the 10-year prison capacity strategy and annual prison capacity statement that the Government published yesterday. As the House will be aware, publishing these documents makes good on a pledge made to this House by the Lord Chancellor in July when she came before the House to set out the emergency measures that we were forced to take to prevent our prisons from filling up entirely.

Let me begin by setting out some context on prison places. As right hon. and hon. Members will be aware, on 4 December, the National Audit Office published a scathing report, “Increasing the capacity of the prison estate to meet demand”. That report is unequivocal in its criticism of the previous Government’s approach to the criminal justice system, including their failure to deliver on their commitment to build 20,000 additional prison places by the mid-2020s. Only 500 additional cells were added to the overall stock of prison places. While the previous Government continued to promise prison places, there were significant delays to projects—in some cases, they ran years behind schedule—and a failure to address rising demand has left the system thousands of places short of the capacity it requires.

The expected cost of the Ministry of Justice and His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service’s prison expansion portfolio to build the 20,000 additional places is currently estimated to be £9.4 billion to £10.1 billion, at least £4.2 billion higher than the estimate in the 2021 spending review carried out by the previous Government. None of this was revealed by Ministers at the time; it only came to light when the Government were elected in July of this year.

It is now clear that even the original mid-2020s commitment was not sufficient to keep pace with the expected demand on prison places, according to the last Government’s own projections. This put the viability of the entire system in jeopardy. Had we run out of prison places, police would not have been able to make arrests and courts could not have held trials. It could have led to a total breakdown of law and order in our country, with all the associated risks to public safety. That is why we were forced to take emergency action, releasing some prisoners earlier than they otherwise would have been—in most cases, by only a few weeks or months. That bought us precious breathing space, but if we do not act, our prisons will fill up again. We must therefore act, including by building more prison places as a matter of urgency.

Integral to our plan for change is ensuring that we have the prison places we need to lock up dangerous criminals and keep the public safe. The 10-year prison capacity strategy sets out how we will deliver that. The strategy is detailed, setting out our commitment to build the 14,000 places that the last Government failed to deliver as part of their 20,000 prison places programme, with the aim of getting that work completed by 2031. It further sets out what we will do: where, when and how we will build new prisons and expand existing ones through additional houseblocks, refurbishments and temporary accommodation.

The strategy is also realistic. As the House knows, prison building is an extraordinarily complex and expensive undertaking. In particular, the planning process to get sites approved for development is complicated and time-consuming. That is why our delivery plans include contingency prison places, which will provide resilience in our building programme should a project become undeliverable or provide poor value for money that cannot be taken forward. We are also ambitious; the strategy sets out how we will work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to streamline the delivery of prison supply, including important reforms to the planning system and delivering on our commitment to recognise prisons as nationally important infrastructure. It is also this Government’s ambition to secure new land, so that we are always ready should further prison builds be required in the future.

We are committed to improving transparency, now and in the future. As such, when parliamentary time allows, we will legislate to make it a statutory requirement for the Government to publish an annual statement on prison capacity like the one we have published. That annual statement will set out prison population projections, the Department’s plan for supply, and the current probation capacity position. It fulfils our transparency commitment for 2024 and, crucially, will hold us and future Governments to account on long-term planning, so that decisions on prison demand and supply are in balance and the public are no longer kept in the dark—as they have been—about the state of our nation’s prisons.

Finally, we are being honest with this House and the public about what must happen next. Building enough prison places is only one part of a much wider solution; as the Government have already made clear, we cannot simply build our way out of these problems. In the coming years, the prison population will continue to increase more quickly than we can build new prisons. That is why in October, we launched the independent sentencing review chaired by the former Lord Chancellor, David Gauke, alongside a panel of experts including the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett. That review will take a bipartisan look at an issue that has been a political football for far too long, punted about by both sides.

The aim of the review is to ensure that we are never again left in a position where we have more prisoners than places available. It will help us to ensure that there is always a prison place for dangerous offenders, that prisons help offenders turn their lives around and bring down reoffending rates, meaning fewer victims, and that the range of punishments for use outside of prison is expanded. The review will make its recommendations in the spring. The Government look forward to responding as quickly as possible so that we can begin to implement any necessary policy changes urgently.

When this Government took office just five months ago, we inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse. Instead of dithering and delaying, we have taken the difficult decisions necessary to stop the criminal justice system from grinding to a halt altogether, which could have led to a total collapse of law and order in our country. However, this is not an overnight fix, and the journey ahead of us is long. This 10-year prison capacity strategy and annual statement, along with the independent sentencing review, are critical steps on that journey. The last Government left our prisons in crisis, putting the public at risk of harm. We will fix our prisons for good, keeping the public safe and restoring their confidence in the criminal justice system.

I commend this statement to the House.

I call the shadow Minister.

I thank the Minister for advance sight of her remarks. I also thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling out what was quite obviously an attempt to avoid scrutiny this week. I also thank the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), for his efforts to ensure that we had a proper statement today.

I begin by making one thing absolutely clear: if Labour MPs think that spending the next few years talking about our record in government is going to stop this Opposition from holding them to account, they are dead wrong. There will be no free passes for them on these Benches. It is already clear to the British public why the Government desperately want them: they are floundering and they know it.

I say to the Minister that I will happily spend all day comparing records of Governments and inheritances. Labour MPs and the Minister decry our record of having had to release 5,500 prisoners early, but the last Labour Government released not just 5,500 or even 10,000 prisoners early. By the end of their time in office, they had released 80,000 prisoners early. That was the state of the system when Labour was in charge, and that does not even include the systematic erosion of the punishment element of our justice system brought about by Labour’s introduction of blanket halfway release for essentially the entire prison population. Labour did not call it early release, but that is what the British public know it to be.

That was the record of the Labour Government that we had to try to turn around. I am proud of the fact that we began to unpick that record by reducing early release for the most serious offenders from halfway to two thirds, and that we introduced a whole-life tariff for premeditated child murder and increased maximum sentences for child abusers and others. Let us be absolutely clear: the root cause of the problem that we now face is a spike in the remand population. We have approximately 7,000 more people in prison on remand than we normally would. That unprecedented spike has occurred as a direct result of covid, and the Government know that.

Will the shadow Minister give way?

No—you cannot give way on a statement.

In fact, prior to covid, we had got the Crown court backlog down to a lower level than it had been under the last Labour Government, another record of which we can be proud. To try to tackle the problem, we increased sitting days and introduced Nightingale courts, and contrary to what the Government have said, we were clear that we would carry on doing everything possible to bring that number down. We did not refuse the judiciary extra sitting days, as this Government have done, nor would we have refused them.

We had agreed a floor on sitting days, not a cap, and negotiations were ongoing. If the judiciary had come to us and asked for more sitting days, we would have responded to that—and not by saying no, which is what this Labour Government have done.

In the prison population estimates that sit alongside this plan is the proof that the Government truly have already given up on fixing this problem. Not only do their projections not target the remand population being brought down, but they show it going up, which means more victims waiting for trials and more prisoners released early. We should be building more prison spaces, and under our leadership we actually increased prison capacity at the fastest rate in living memory. That was not so we could accommodate more people on remand, but so we could go even further in ensuring that offenders are properly punished and victims get justice.

The Government want to talk about the last 14 years, but I am afraid this plan leaves me asking what they were doing for those 14 years. They came into office telling the British public they had it all worked out. What have they done on sentencing? They have asked someone else to do a review. What have they done on how we prosecute murder? They have asked someone else to do a review. What ideas have they come into office with for tackling the court backlog? Absolutely none. Today, as the Minister knows, we have simply had a reannouncement of our planned prison building programme, with four new prisons, all of which were already announced or under way before Labour took office. This is not a bold new strategy; it is a continuation of work started under the Conservative Government.

There are of course some important questions for the Minister. First, given that we did not do so, why have the Government refused additional Crown court sitting days to the judiciary? Secondly, why do their prison population figures project an increase in the remand population? Thirdly, given that they are committed to building more prison spaces whatever the sentencing review says—they will have to decide that; they cannot park responsibility with an independent review—will she commit to continuing our programme of increasing the amount of time that the most serious offenders stay in prison? Fourthly, missing from the prison population figures is any transparency at all about the number of foreign offenders, so what are their estimates for the foreign offender population in our prisons in future years?

The Government blame us for their early releases, but the situation was nothing compared with the scale of the early releases they themselves oversaw when they were last in office. They released prisoners they should not have done, they botched the legislation and had to come back to this House to correct it, they let people out without tags who should have been tagged, and they have given up on fixing the fundamental issue of the remand population. The Leader of the Opposition has said that

“we did not get everything right in government”,

and she knows there are no easy answers to these challenges, only trade-offs. However, this Government are making it clearer and clearer how not to do it, and we on these Benches will be there every step of the way so that the British public know exactly that.

Yet again, zero humility from the people who put us in this crisis—it is absolutely staggering to think that that is what the Opposition want to tell the British people. There was no apology for the crisis they left us. When we took office in July, we were just days away from a complete collapse of our criminal justice system because of the inheritance we received from the previous Government. The fact is that this Government are taking action. We have increased Crown court sitting days—there are 500 more—to ensure that we have capacity in the system, and magistrates’ sentencing powers have been increased from six to 12 months, freeing up 2,000 more days in the Crown court.

I am glad the shadow Minister mentioned foreign national offenders, because like him I believe that we need to be doing more to deport the foreign national offenders in our jails. However, there is a difference between him and me, because this Government are actually doing something about it—less rhetoric, more action. We are on track to deport more foreign nationals from our prisons than at any time in our recent history. Since coming into office, this Government have deported more than 1,500 foreign national offenders, which is more than at this time last year, and who was the Immigration Minister then? Oh, that’s right: it was none other than the shadow Secretary of State for Justice himself. If it was that easy, why did he not do it after 14 years in Government? This Government are taking action to ensure that we have a criminal justice system that is fit for purpose.

I call the Chair of the Justice Committee.

I welcome the prison capacity strategy. Given the crumbling condition of much of the prison estate, it is right that the Government are pressing ahead with the delivery of modern prisons. I also welcome the explicit linking of this strategy to the independent sentencing review, and the recognition that, without changes to sentencing policy, prisons could be full again in a year’s time, which would mean extending early release. Does the Minister agree that a long-term reduction in prisoner numbers in a way that best protects the public requires a strategy for rehabilitation to reduce reoffending, and when will the Government share their proposals for achieving that?

I thank my hon. Friend the Chair of the Justice Committee for his questions. I am aware that the Lord Chancellor is due to give evidence to his Committee next week, and I am sure she will outline those steps in more detail. The capacity strategy that we have published is just one step in our plan, as well as going forward with building more prisons. We need every single element of our justice system to be working, and that includes the independent sentencing review. We look forward to the recommendations coming next year, so that we can take them forward and we never have to be in this position again. We look forward to setting out our plans in due course.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement, and I thank the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), for the point of order that I think helped to bring the Minister to the House with this statement today.

Years of neglect under the previous Conservative Government have left our prisons overcrowded and unequipped to provide the tough rehabilitation required, which has let down victims and survivors in my patch and across the country. In fact, as recently as this week, the Conservative Opposition let down those victims and survivors by voting against the measure to exclude people such as stalkers and murderers from the early release scheme.

The result of the Conservatives’ incompetence is the SDS40 scheme—the standard determinate sentences early release scheme—which has seen thousands of ex-offenders released early to unlock emergency prison places. The Minister knows my concerns about that scheme, particularly in relation to domestic abuse, and I hope she will support my proposals to patch it up. Will she, however, confirm what the criteria will be for reviewing the scheme next year?

Ultimately, Liberal Democrats believe that we need a sustainable solution to tackling this problem, because more prisons mean more offenders, more offenders mean more victims, and more victims mean more failure. With 80% of people in prison being reoffenders, we know that reducing reoffending must be the key. I know that from having spent my career before reaching this place supporting kids out of crime and gangs, so why, in a prison capacity statement of over 1,000 words, was reducing reoffending mentioned just once? Will the Minister reaffirm her commitment to that effort, and can she provide more details on how she will reduce reoffending to protect victims and survivors across this country?

I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesman for his comments, and he is right to raise the issue of reoffending. It is important to note that we have prison capacity available to protect the public, to lock up high-risk offenders and to ensure we have public safety measures available, but we obviously see tackling reoffending as a serious priority. We are looking at it across Government and pulling every lever available to us. Every Department must come together to tackle it, and part of that is the independent sentencing review. As he knows full well, however, when we have a prison population that is running at boiling hot, we cannot get into our prisons and do rehabilitation work. Yesterday, I was really pleased to visit His Majesty’s Prison Downview and see the vital work being done with the women in that prison, which is really important to achieve rehabilitation on the outside, prevent reoffending and protect the public.

On SDS40, the hon. Member will know that we had to take immediate action within days of coming into office to protect the public, and to ensure we had places in our prisons to lock up high-risk offenders and keep the public safe. Legally, we could only exclude offences, not offenders, and we did introduce a wider set of exclusions than under the last Government’s early release scheme. All offenders released under the scheme are on licence and are subject to recall. We are working to ensure that we never again get into the position of having emergency releases, and that we have prison places available and can work on rehabilitating our prisoners so that they can serve a vital role in society.

I call Justice Committee member Alex Barros-Curtis.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I was just going to refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a qualified solicitor, and I am also a member of the Justice Committee under the excellent chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter).

I thank the Minister for the statement and the commitments she has made. I must admit that my head is still spinning from the extraordinary response from the Tories’ spokesperson, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan), given their absolute failure over the last 14 years to build the prison places that they legislated for, so we will have no more of that hypocrisy.

I welcome the publication of the 10-year prison capacity strategy, which I know the Justice Committee will scrutinise carefully. Concerningly, however, it notes that we could run out of prison spaces by as early as November 2025. Aside from the findings of the independent sentencing review, when they come, what other steps does the Minister anticipate the Department taking to bridge the potential gap in prison places?

My hon. Friend will know that we are straining every sinew to ensure we get this right. This is a whole-system approach. Justice is a system, and we need every part of it to be working for it to work correctly. My colleague the Prisons Minister in the other place is due to visit Texas to learn from the interesting model there, where offenders earn time off their custodial sentence for good behaviour. Texas has cut crime by a third. We are also looking at new advances in technology to see how they could help. For example, in Singapore artificial intelligence, combined with surveillance cameras, monitors offenders and spots moments that could escalate into violence. That is also being done in the Netherlands. A lot of options are available to us.

The other thing we are doing in the immediate term is increasing the sentencing powers of magistrates courts from six to 12 months’ maximum imprisonment for a single triable either way offence. That will also help us to bear down on the large remand population by ensuring that those on remand are sentenced far more quickly.

This strategy does little more than commit to deliver the 14,000 places that the previous Government committed to delivering, except that it will cost more and take longer. To what extent have the Government factored in optimism bias when working out the delivery timeframe?

Honestly, the display from the Conservative party is staggering given the inheritance we were left with, and there is still no humility whatsoever. We have published a realistic strategy for how we plan to deliver this, with contingency timelines built in, offering real solutions. As I said, this is less of the rhetoric than we got from the Conservative party, and more actual action on delivering these places. You failed to build—[Interruption.] The Conservative party failed to build these places, but we are going to deliver them.

Exactly. The Minister knows that “you” would refer to me, and that would not be appropriate.

The Conservative Government’s dereliction of duty meant that they failed to deliver 20,000 promised prison places, which exposes the hypocrisy in any Conservative claims to be the party of law and order. I welcome the new Government’s 10-year prison capacity statement. Does the Minister agree that publishing an annual statement on prison places will allow transparency, accountability, and affirm that Labour is the party of law and order?

I could not agree more. The Labour party is being honest with the public about the situation that we inherited. We are publishing our plan to be transparent about how we will deliver, and we will commit to doing that annually to ensure that the public are never again left in the dark about the state of our prisons.

Since this Government introduced their early release policy, we have seen criminals who should be in jail out on the streets enjoying themselves with champagne, with one even thanking the Prime Minister personally. Instead of letting those dangerous people out of jail, it would be much better to sort out the remand backlog and the increase of 7,000 in the number of prison places taken up by people on remand. Instead, the Government are capping the number of sitting days. The Minister says that the number of sitting days is adequate. At what point will the number of prisoners in our jails waiting on remand be returned to the pre-pandemic level? What is the date by which that will be achieved?

I have outlined the actions we are taking to tackle the remand population in our prisons. We are dealing with the inheritance that we received from the previous Government. We have increased Crown court sitting days and increased sentencing powers for our magistrates courts. We will publish our plans in due course, and we are being transparent with the House. The Lord Chancellor will be in front of the Justice Committee next week, and I am sure she will be happy to answer those questions then.

Having listened to some of the contributions from Conservative Members, I cannot quite believe my ears. They are coming to this place and suggesting that they should be proud of leaving this Government a justice system with fewer than 100 places in men’s prisons across England and Wales. Would a better response to the statement not have been a much simpler, one-word answer—sorry?

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. Sorry seems to be the hardest word for the Conservative party. This Government have started as they mean to go on. That is why within the first six months we have already delivered nearly 500 places, and pledged to continue building the remaining places of that 20,000-place prison building programme. We have also launched the independent sentencing review, in parallel with our 10-year prison capacity strategy. That review will ensure that sentences deliver better outcomes for prisoners and protect the public, and that we will always have space to lock up dangerous offenders.

The Minister likes to talk about inheritances, but if she checks the record, she will discover that prison overcrowding was higher in 2008, 2009 and 2010 than it was in 2024. It is true that we brought back longer sentences for the worst offenders. That was the right thing to do. It is also true that crime came down.

There are two enormous areas that the Minister needs to work on—or perhaps I should say continue the work we were doing in government. One is the population on remand and the length of time people spend on remand. The other is at a different point in someone’s sentence, and the length of time they wait for a Parole Board hearing. We need more capacity to replace the older capacity with newer prisons, which are more conducive to rehabilitation and to getting people on to a stable path and into work.

I welcome the Minister’s continuing with the previous Government’s programme. I just hope it is more successful than when Gordon Brown’s Government tried to build the Titan prisons. If they had been built, we would not be having this conversation at all.

I believe the right hon. Gentleman was the prisons Minister in the previous Government, so he will know all too well the impact that this situation has had, yet they failed to build the amount of prison places we need and there is no apology, yet again, to the British public for the crisis we have inherited. We need a resilient and functioning prison estate to ensure that prisoners have the opportunity to be rehabilitated, as the right hon. Gentleman said. We are tackling our remand population, increasing the sentencing powers of magistrates, and building those new prison places he mentioned. As I said, we are taking action and delivering on our promises, whereas the previous Government failed to deliver.

The Minister is aware of my view that it is folly to build new prisons to increase capacity. All we will do is create more prisoners and more overcrowding—it is a supply-led industry. Will she confirm what new ideas will be incorporated into the new prisons? Rehabilitation, not incarceration, is the key to addressing criminality.

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. We cannot build our way out of this problem, and the prison population will only continue to increase more quickly than we can build new prisons. That is why the 10-year prison capacity strategy is just one part of that prolonged solution. The second part is the independent sentencing review, which we have outlined. Focusing on preventing reoffending is crucial to this Government’s mission to build safer streets. For example, the Government have committed to halving the prevalence of violence against women and girls and halving knife crime within a decade, and I will work closely with Ministers across Government to ensure that we deliver on those bold ambitions.