Tories Promise 50,000 Prison Places Funded by Aid Cuts
The Conservatives have pledged 50,000 new prison places in England and Wales to put a stop to early releases, at a cost of £2bn a year, funded by taking £1bn from the aid budget and £1bn from culture, media and sport. There are currently about 89,000 useable places and prisons are 98% full. Their conference opens in Birmingham tomorrow.
The scale is both the claim and the difficulty. The pledge would lift capacity by more than half, most of it within a first parliament and all of it inside seven years, against Labour’s promise of 14,000 extra places by 2031 — and it would need legislation early in a new parliament to override planning and procurement rules, with private finance. “A violent criminal doesn’t become less dangerous just because the government has run out of prison cells,” Kemi Badenoch said. Labour’s reply went straight to the record: Bridget Phillipson said that across fourteen years in office the Conservatives “added just 500 prison places and closed 23 prisons”. The Prison Governors’ Association raised the harder objection — that “building 50,000 cells is one thing; finding the thousands of experienced officers, governors and specialists needed to run them safely is quite another”. Watch whether a date is put on it.