Justice secretary set to announce plans on prisons overcrowding crisis – UK politics live | Politics
Justice secretary set to announce plans on prison overcrowding crisis
The Justice Secretary is set to announce plans on Friday to address prison overcrowding in England and Wales, with fears jails will run out of space within weeks.
Shabana Mahmood is expected to set out emergency measures that could include reducing the time before some prisoners are automatically released. She is expected to argue that the level of overcrowding, described by the Ministry of Justice as “catastrophic”, requires “immediate action” to “pull the justice system back from the brink of total collapse”.
On Thursday, the prime minister said the scale of the problem was “worse than I thought” and expressed anger at being faced with taking emergency measures so early in his premiership.
Responding to a question at the Nato summit, Keir Starmer called the crisis “unforgivable” and showed “gross irresponsibility” from the previous government.
One of the moves expected to be announced on Friday is a reduction in the amount of a sentence a prisoner must serve before being automatically released.
Most prisoners currently serve 50% of their sentence in jail, with the remaining 50% being served on licence and under threat of being returned to prison if they break their parole conditions.
Key events
Robert Buckland, the former secretary of state for justice and former MP, has appeared on Sky News to talk about the prison crisis.
He said that only 6,000 of the 20,000 new places the Tories promised by the end of this year have been created, and that the prison building programme “which I started with Rishi Sunak is coming forward, but not at a pace that is quick enough I think to meet demand”.
He told viewers:
My advice to the new Justice Secretary – and I wish her well, she’s just come into post – is to make sure that we aren’t releasing people who could pose a risk, particularly domestic abusers, stalkers, those types of offenders. I think it would be wholly inappropriate to release them.
I think we do need to be absolutely iron on our commitment to protect the public. And the new government would be best advised to make that clear from the outset. Because sending mixed messages about punishment is not a good way, frankly, to start a penal policy when you’ve just taken office.
Last week Buckland lost his Swindon South to Labour’s Heidi Alexander.
Shadow home secretary James Cleverly has responded to reports of the deaths of four people this morning while attempting to cross the channel. In a message on social media, Cleverly said “Reports of more deaths in the channel are a tragedy. As a country we must do everything in our power to stop the boats and put an end to this vile trade in human suffering.”
Ellie Chowns, the new Green Party of England and Wales MP for North Herefordshire has published the first of what she says she hopes will be weekly video updates about what it is like being one of the four new Green Party MPs.
In the first video she described her first week in parliament as “such a buzz”, saying there had been an “incredibly friendly atmosphere in the Houses of Parliament” with a lot to learn and lots of new faces to get to know. You can watch it here.
My first week in Westminster! ✅
Thank you for all of your votes and support!
Today I’m back in the constituency, holding my first surgery.
(PS Do let me know if these videos are helpful and tell me if you have any questions about our daily activities as Green MPs) pic.twitter.com/28mMx0eGA5
— Ellie Chowns (@EllieChowns) July 12, 2024
Nimo Omer
Prisons are not the only sector facing a crisis. In our First Edition newsletter today Nimo Omer spoke to the Guardian’s City editor, Anna Isaac, about Thames Water:
The heavily indebted water supplier Thames Water has been placed in special measures, on a turnaround oversight regime. Under this scheme, it is going to face increased scrutiny from Ofwat over its finances and the way the company is run. It has been told that it needs to reduce sewage spills by 64%, supply interruptions by two-thirds and leaks by 19%.
The purpose of this intervention goes beyond the financial situation, Anna says. “The regulator is also scrutinising how Thames’s operations are working on a day to day level, so it’s a turnaround plan, as well as an investment plan.”
The measures will remain in place until Thames can prove that it is in an acceptable financial position. There could be conditions to exiting the regime: the amount of debt it can take on could be limited; it may have to restructure and separate the business; it could face some form of nationalisation; or it could be listed on the stock exchange to secure extra equity.
Nothing changes immediately because of this intervention. Thames has enough money to run until the middle of next year and the special measures are meant to help get it back on track, “but ultimately, it’s about whether or not private investors want to put money in the medium term and that reality has not changed”.
Read more here: Friday briefing – What the crisis at Thames Water means for customers
Polly Toynbee’s latest column is up, in which she argues Labour will rightly be judged by how it fixes our problems, but we should never forget who left the UK in such a rotten state …
Mark Fairhurst, chairman of the Prison Officers Association, has told the BBC it is more dangerous to use police cells when prisons run out of space than it is to release prisoners early.
PA Media reports he told BBC Breakfast:
What is more dangerous to the public is if we don’t act, so if we’re clogging up police cells they’re unable to arrest people because there’s nowhere for them to go. That’s more danger to the public. What we’re doing is releasing people early who are going to get released anyway at some point.
It is expected that those convicted of sex offences, violent crime with a sentence of more than four years, domestic violence, stalkers, and anyone who has breached a harassment order would probably not be eligible for early release.
Fairhurst said releasing some inmates after they’ve served 40% of their sentences rather than 50% would give prisons about 12 to 18 months before further measures are needed.
How full are the prisons in England and Wales? PA Media reports that for the prison system to run smoothly and effectively, officials ideally want to keep a buffer of 1,425 cell spaces free in men’s prisons at all times to make sure there is enough space to hold sudden influxes of inmates.
According to sources, just 700 are now free. It is understood the latest figures show 83,380 inmates are currently being held in the adult male estate.
A senior prison source told PA: “If nothing was done, I would be professionally very, very worried by the August Bank Holiday. We’re operationally in trouble at less than 300 spaces left.
“We have been running at over 99% occupancy for the best part of two years. That puts huge pressure on our ability to reduce re-offending, to deliver purposeful activity, and obviously on our staff. It definitely exacerbates issues like safety in terms of violence, it makes the estate much more tricky for us to run.
“We’re very vulnerable to shocks in the estate. That can be big, high profile shocks, like the 2011 civil disorder, like a prison riot or it could actually be much more mundane things like an outbreak of bedbugs that would require us to close the wing, and fumigate it for two or three weeks. We are very vulnerable to shocks at this level.”
Starmer: prison crisis left by Tory government is ‘gross irresponsibility’ and ‘unforgiveable’
Prime minister Keir Starmer has said the state of the prison service in England and Wales his government has inherited from Rishi Sunak is “unforgiveable” and shows the “gross irresponsibility of the outgoing government”.
He accused them of failing to provide “a basic function of government”, noting that “I can’t build a prison in the first seven days of a Labour government.”
Speaking in Washington while attending the Nato summit, and with the government expected to announce the early release of some prisoners to free up space, PA Media reports Starmer said:
The crux of the problem we face at the moment, and it is a terrible problem, is that we’ve got far too many prisoners for the prison places that we’ve got and we soon will have.
That is gross irresponsibility of the outgoing government. It is a basic function of government that you should have enough places for your prisoners that judges are sending to prison.
And for that to have failed I think tells you something material about the last government – that we have to pick this up and we have to fix it.
I can’t build a prison in the first seven days of a Labour government.
We knew there was going to be a problem, but the scale of the problem was worse than we thought.
And the nature of the problem is pretty unforgivable in my book, having worked in criminal justice, to have allowed your criminal justice system to get to a state where you simply haven’t got the prison places for prisoners.
This is a predictable problem – it’s shocking. And I think that when further details are released of this, you’ll have plenty of extra questions for those that came before us.
Justice secretary set to announce plans on prison overcrowding crisis
The Justice Secretary is set to announce plans on Friday to address prison overcrowding in England and Wales, with fears jails will run out of space within weeks.
Shabana Mahmood is expected to set out emergency measures that could include reducing the time before some prisoners are automatically released. She is expected to argue that the level of overcrowding, described by the Ministry of Justice as “catastrophic”, requires “immediate action” to “pull the justice system back from the brink of total collapse”.
On Thursday, the prime minister said the scale of the problem was “worse than I thought” and expressed anger at being faced with taking emergency measures so early in his premiership.
Responding to a question at the Nato summit, Keir Starmer called the crisis “unforgivable” and showed “gross irresponsibility” from the previous government.
One of the moves expected to be announced on Friday is a reduction in the amount of a sentence a prisoner must serve before being automatically released.
Most prisoners currently serve 50% of their sentence in jail, with the remaining 50% being served on licence and under threat of being returned to prison if they break their parole conditions.
Welcome and opening summary …
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics for Friday. It is Martin Belam here with you today. These are the headlines …
There is no business scheduled in the Commons or Lords, and the Scottish parliament is in recess from 29 June to 1 September. There is nothing scheduled in Stormont, but in the Senedd at 10am there is a first minister scrutiny committee meeting. Richard Callard, a shareholder executive and UK government investments official is appearing at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry.
Do drop me a line by emails if you spot typos, errors or omissions. You can find me at [email protected].
