Government Commits to Creating 14,000 More Prison Places by 2031

Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood during a visit to HMP Bedford in Harpur, Bedfordshire, on July 12, 2024. Joe Giddens/PA Wire

The government has committed £2.3 billion towards expanding the prison estate by 14,000 places by 2031, with a further £500 million going towards building maintenance.

The Ministry of Justice said on Wednesday it will build four new prisons in the next seven years, which will open up around 6,500 new places.

Some 6,400 more spaces will be added by building houseblocks on site at existing prisons.

Another 1,050 spaces will be created by building Rapid Deployment Cells which are modular temporary units designed for low-risk prisoners.

A further 1,150 places will be freed up through refurbishing the Victorian prison estate, bringing spaces up to standard.

The plans form part of the new 10-year Prison Capacity Strategy, which will work alongside the Independent Sentencing Review.

Announcing the plans, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said her Conservative predecessors had “pretended they could send people away for longer and longer without building the prisons they promised.”

The Prison Capacity Strategy showed that the Conservatives’ prison building plans “were years delayed and nearly £5bn over budget. They left our prisons in crisis, on the edge of collapse.”

However, Mahmood admitted that these plans are largely a continuation of the previous Conservative government’s prison-building strategy—albeit with a later deadline.

Already Greenlit by Conservatives

When asked whether these four new prisons had already been greenlit under the previous Conservative government, the justice secretary told Nick Ferrari on LBC on Wednesday morning: “Yes. The previous government’s programme was to deliver 20,000 prison places by the mid-2020s.

“What our publication today makes clear is the extent of the failures of planning and the delays that was seen under the previous government.”

Mahmood continued, “The reality is that the last Tory government took too long to admit that they needed to build.”

“To get this new supply through the planning process, we will deliver what was left of that 20,000 programme, which was the 14,000 prison places,” she added.

The Conservative government had promised to increase prison capacity by 20,000 by 2027, by building six more prisons as well as more temporary wings, alongside refurbishing existing cell blocks.

Last week the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that these plans were over budget and would take five years longer than expected—until 2031—to be delivered. The NAO said that as of September, only one-third (6,518) of the 20,000 have been made available.

Of the six, the previous government oversaw the construction and opening of HMP Five Wells in Northamptonshire and HMP Fosse Way in Leicestershire, with a third— HMP Millsike in Yorkshire—scheduled for completion in 2025.

The remaining three had been held up by planning delays, the auditors said.

‘No Plan’

The new government’s prison strategy pledges to deliver three new prisons in Leicestershire, Buckinghamshire, and Lancashire, as well as as HMP Millsike, which was under way during the Conservative administration.

The plan also notes that the three other prisons had been in the planning system for 40 months, 30 months, and 29 months, respectively.

Later speaking to Ferrari, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick said, “Despite the fanfare that we’ve heard from the justice secretary, today, Labour aren’t proposing to build a single new prison beyond those that were already in train.”

Jenrick continued that there will still be a shortfall in capacity even once all the new spaces are acquired.

“So there is no plan, I’m afraid, to fix the problems we’re facing in our prisons.”

Building Delays

The Ministry of Justice also announced that there will also be changes to planning rules, which will see prisons designated as “sites of national importance.”

This will “put an end to lengthy delays in the planning process which are stopping new prisons from being built as quickly as possible.”

Mahmood said that some of the challenges faced by the previous government was because of planning delays.

She told Ferrari: “I hope we can all agree that prisons are absolutely critical national infrastructure. They have to be delivered, and the nation simply can’t be in a position where we run out of prison places.”

According to the government report, the adult male prison estate has been running at over 99 percent capacity “for much of the 18 months since February 2023.”

In July, Mahmood announced a temporary early prison release strategy for certain categories of prisoners, in order to bring down the high number of inmates.

Since then, along with the prisons estate expansion plans, the government announced an Independent Review of Sentencing.

The review, led by former Lord Chancellor David Gauke, will look at expanding the range and use of punishments outside of incarceration and in-prison rehabilitation, while also ensuring that “the most serious offenders can always be sent too prison to protect the public.”

It will be released in the spring of 2025.