Prisons will still run out of room despite building plans – Justice Secretary

The country’s prisons will still run out of space despite Government plans to build four more jails, the Justice Secretary has said.

Shabana Mahmood also suggested councils could be overruled to push through the building plans in a bid to grip the overcrowding crisis and that jury trials could be scrapped in some instances to tackle a backlog of cases.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has promised to find a total of 14,000 cell spaces in jails by 2031.

Some 6,400 of these will be at newly built prisons, with £2.3 billion towards the cost over the next two years.

The remaining places will be found by measures including building new wings at existing jails, or by refurbishing cells currently out of action, and an extra £500 million will go towards “vital building maintenance”, the department said on Wednesday.

Asked whether the estate would run out of cells within three years, even with 14,000 extra places, the Justice Secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We will run out because even all of that new supply, with the increase in prison population that we will see as a result of that new supply, doesn’t help you with the rise in demand, because demand is still rising faster than any supply could catch up with.”

Stressing that “building alone” will not be enough to deal with the overcrowding crisis, Ms Mahmood also confirmed “we will have to expand the range of punishment outside of prison”, adding: “That does mean that we will have more offenders monitored outside.”

Prisons will be deemed sites of “national importance” amid efforts to prevent lengthy planning delays, with Ms Mahood saying decisions on new prison building will be made by Deputy Prime Minster Angela Rayner, who is the Housing Secretary.

Asked whether the Government would “fast-track applications and overrule the objections of local people and local councils”, Ms Mahood told BBC Breakfast: “Yes, so our manifesto commitment was that we consider prisons to be of national importance.

“These are critical infrastructure projects, they are absolutely necessary to make sure the country doesn’t run out of prison places.”

Asked about concerns people may have about a prison being built near their homes, she said: “We have to be honest about the fact that prison building is required.”

Elsewhere, Ms Mahmood hinted at the prospect of jury trials being abandoned in some cases to tackle backlogs in the system.

She told LBC an announcement would be made “imminently” in the Commons and to the media on the issue.

“We do have a Crown Court backlog that is very high and likely to rise, because the sheer number of cases that are coming into the system is so big, that even if we were sitting at maximum capacity across the whole of the Crown Court, we still wouldn’t be able to touch the sides of that backlog,” she said.

“That does say that we need to think about doing things differently, and the announcements that we will be making will set out the Government’s proposals in this space.”

Ms Mahmood added: “I do believe that justice delayed is justice denied. So, we are going to have to think about a different way of managing our Crown Courts so that we can crack down on that backlog properly.”

The full details of the Government’s prisons strategy, which involves a 10-year plan the MoJ says is aimed at making sure “we can always lock up dangerous criminals”, are expected to be published later.

The announcement comes after government estimates published last week indicated more than 100,000 prisoners could be held in jails in England and Wales by 2029.

This followed warnings from Whitehall’s spending watchdog that Government plans to boost prison capacity could fall short by thousands of cell spaces within two years, and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds more than anticipated.

Since September thousands of inmates have been freed early in a bid to cut jail overcrowding, by temporarily reducing the proportion of sentences which some prisoners must serve behind bars in England and Wales, from 50% to 40%.

But prisons are still expected to reach critical capacity again by July.

MoJ figures show there were 86,089 adult prisoners behind bars in England and Wales on Monday.

The so-called operational capacity for English and Welsh men’s and women’s prisons is 88,822, indicating there is now cell space for 2,733 criminals.

Asked if she could guarantee there would be no more emergency releases over the next five years, Ms Mahmood told Sky News: “I’m not going to do any more emergency releases of the kind either that I’ve had to do at the beginning or as the last Conservative government did with their early release scheme as well.

“I want to avoid that scenario. We will not be doing that. There are other operational measures that we might have to take to try and stabilise the prison system… so more people potentially on home detention curfew.”

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick accused Chancellor Rachel Reeves of funding “inflation-busting pay rises for her trade union paymasters, but not new prisons to keep the public safe” in response to the announcement, while Labour said “gross negligence” of prisons by the Tories was “unforgivable”.

Pavan Dhaliwal, chief executive of charity Revolving Doors, said: “We cannot simply build our way out of this crisis, increasing prison capacity and improving the condition of the estate is necessary but must come hand in hand with the commitment to exploring alternatives to custody which the Government is examining via its sentencing review.”

Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the money earmarked for opening new jails “would be better invested in securing an effective and responsive probation service, working to cut crime in the community”.

The Law Society of England and Wales repeated calls for the plans to be matched by investment in legal aid, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts, and urged a focus on the “rehabilitation for prisoners to reduce reoffending rates and tackle the courts backlogs to help bring down the remand population”.