Labour have been vocal in blaming the Conservatives for the current problem with prison places and have implied that the Conservative Government just ignored the problem.
Dame Angela Eagle, a Labour minister in the Home Office, recently said “The last government closed loads of prison places and didn’t replace any of them, so I think that colleagues in the MoJ will be considering anything that they can to alleviate the problem,” she said.
This was a lie.
The House of Commons Library has given us the following data;
- “On 16 October 2023, the Justice Secretary announced measures to try to ease the pressure on prison capacity in England and Wales, noting that the prison population is now greater than it has ever been…
- The [Conservative] Government is undertaking a prison building programme to increase capacity. In the 2021 Prisons Strategy White Paper, it committed to creating 20,000 additional prison places by the mid-2020s. By July 2023, around 5,400 places had been delivered.”
Nearly 10,700 prison places had been closed since 2010—many of them old and/or dilapidated. At the same time, nearly 11,000 places had been created. The brand new HMP Fosse Way received its first prisoners on Monday 29 May 2023. and construction is already well underway on another new prison, HMP Millsike, at Full Sutton in Yorkshire which will open in 2025. These prisons will deliver over 3,000 places between them.
More prisons were also planned but. at the time, hadn't been granted planning permission.
Now we just need to wait for the current Labour Government to announce next year that they have solved the problem by opening a new prison, HMP Millsike!
Information sources:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-is-the-government-doing-to-reduce-pressure-on-prison-capacity/Published 19/10/2023
Prison Reform Trust report https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/decision-time/ Published 13/10/2023
Spending on prisons, see https://www.statista.com/statistics/298654/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-prisons/ Published 26/08/2024
NAO Background report, see https://www.nao.org.uk/work-in-progress/increasing-the-capacity-of-the-prison-estate-to-meet-demand/
Contract awarded for UK’s first all-electric ‘green’ prison - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)