Damian Hinds – 2022 Statement on Prison Capacity
The statement made by Damian Hinds, the Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, in the House of Commons on 30 November 2022.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. May I open with a sincere apology for what you have just referred to? With the way timings have worked out today, we got this wrong, and I apologise for it. I assure you and the Opposition that it was not deliberate. I appreciate that that does not help with the practicalities of this, but I want to assure you and the Opposition that this was not a deliberate move on our part.
The first responsibility of Government is to keep people safe. That means taking dangerous criminals off the streets, and to do that we must always ensure that we have sufficient prison places available to serve the courts. This Government have been decisive in our tough approach to crime. We are well on our way to the recruitment of 20,000 additional police officers. We have legislated to introduce tougher sentences for the most serious crimes, with rape prosecutions having increased by 3% between the year ending June 2021 and now, and by 49% since 2019, and we are committed to driving down the backlog of outstanding court cases following the pandemic.
We have long anticipated the prison population rising as a result of those measures, and that is why we are delivering the largest prison building programme since the Victorian era, with 20,000 additional places. We have already created over 3,100 of them, including the recent change of use of His Majesty’s Prison Morton Hall and our brand-new prison, HMP Five Wells. A further 1,700 places are due to come online with occupation in tranches from next spring with the opening of HMP Fosse Way. This is in addition to the thousands of further places that will become available through additional house blocks—for example at HMP Stocken, which is due to finish construction next year—and major refurbishment programmes across the existing estate. Just a few weeks ago, I attended a ground breaking ceremony at the site beside HMP Full Sutton in Yorkshire, where we have started construction for the next new prison, which will hold 1,500 category C prisoners when it opens in 2025.
However, in recent months we have experienced an acute and sudden increase in the prison population, in part due to the aftermath of the Criminal Bar Association strike action over the summer, which led to a significantly higher numbers of offenders on remand. With court hearings resuming, a surge in offenders is coming through the criminal justice system, placing capacity pressure on adult male prisons in particular.
The public rightly expect us to take the action necessary to hold offenders who have been sentenced by the courts. That is why I am announcing today that we have written to the National Police Chiefs’ Council to request the temporary use of up to 400 police cells, through an established protocol known as Operation Safeguard. That will provide the immediate additional capacity we need in the coming weeks to ensure the smooth running of the prison estate, and to continue taking dangerous criminals off the streets. I thank the National Police Chiefs’ Council for its support in mobilising this operation. We already routinely work hand in glove with police forces across the country to occasionally use police cells to hold offenders overnight. The triggering of Operation Safeguard is not an unprecedented move. It is an established procedure that has been used before to ensure that our prison system can operate effectively and safely during periods of high demand. It last happened in 2006, and then in 2007 to 2008.
With the expected increase in offenders coming into the estate over the coming weeks, it is right that we give police forces as much notice as possible of the short-term need to use their cells, so that together we can safely and adequately ensure availability of the spaces needed. The activation of Operation Safeguard will ensure that His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and police forces can jointly plan how and where those places will be accessed. We are working with prison governors across the estate to ensure that we safely maximise the places available within our prisons. This plan, alongside our existing plan to provide 20,000 modern places, will ensure that we have enough places to cut crime and keep the public safe.
The capacity pressure is specific to the adult male estate, and there is ample capacity in the women’s and youth estates. We have delivered on our commitments to reduce the number of young people and women in our prisons, helping us to tackle the drivers of crime by focusing on rehabilitation. The Government are working to drive down reoffending, and we are investing £200 million a year by 2024-25 to get prison leavers into skills training, work and stable accommodation. We are investing to make prisons safer and more secure, rolling out almost 7,900 next-generation body-worn video cameras to 56 prisons. In March we completed our £100 million security investment programme to fight crime in prisons, including tackling the smuggling of illicit items such as drugs and mobile phones.
In conclusion, I thank the police for their support and pay tribute to the frontline prison staff and police officers who work tirelessly every day to keep the public safe. Taken together with our programme to expand the prison estate, I have every confidence that the commencement of these measures will ensure that we continue to deliver justice, protect the public and reduce reoffending, as the public would rightly expect, and I commend this statement to the House.
