Contribution
I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, and the noble Lord, Lord Beith, for their comments. We are all aware that we have a problem. The problem is that the prison population increases by 4,500 people a year. In the summer, when I was six weeks into this job, we were 99.9% full: in fact, we had fewer than 100 spaces in our prisons. It was clear that this was not just a problem, it was a very dangerous problem. We are now running at 97% or 96% in the male estate and can already see the benefits of that. But we need to keep building new prisons, and we got planning permission for HMP Garth earlier this month. We do not just need new prisons; we need new house blocks and to ensure that we do not lose cells.
We cannot build our way out of the difficulties we have; we also need sentencing reform. As noble Lords are aware, David Gauke is leading a sentencing review, which will be concluded by the spring. We need to make sure that demand and supply are in balance, because we always need to have space for the police to arrest and charge people and put them in prison. Interestingly, last week I went to Spain to visit the prisons over there. It has 15,000 spare cells, which we can only dream of here. Unsurprisingly, when I went round the prisons there, things were much calmer than they are here.
How will we get more capacity? We have to create these 14,000 prison places. The cost is very high, and much higher because of the delays in the previous Government’s building. But the other real problem is that we have had a net increase of only 500 prison cells because so many have been lost and prisons have been sold. One of the things that is really important is to make sure that we do not lose prison places and prison wings. I am looking forward to visiting HMP Millsike before Christmas and seeing what a good, environmentally state-of-the-art prison looks like. But I have also been recently to HMP Manchester and HMP Winchester, both of which had urgent notifications, to see the other side of the coin, where prisons need serious investment. I am pleased that we have managed to find £500 million to invest.
We have many great prisons as well. We need to future-proof things and to keep buying land on top. In my old job, every day I was looking at the sales figures of our retail chain; now I am looking every day at the prison population and seeing how much capacity we have. I am pleased to say that, so far, our numbers are slightly under the projection we have been looking at.
I have seen a number of rapid deployment cells and the issue with them is that, even though we do not have a choice—we need to do them—the extra cost is not just in the cells but in the extra visitor centre space, extra kitchen space and so on. That is why it is not just a cheap temporary option; it is an expensive temporary option.
On Crown Court backlog days, I am very pleased that colleagues have found more headroom and we have managed to get 2,500 extra sitting days; and the magistrates’ courts going from six to 12 months will free up 2,000 extra days. It will help with the remand population—17,000 is a significant issue—but it is still not enough.
Yes, we need to build prisons. Yes, we need the sentencing review, and to wait and see what the conclusions are. We always need prison cells for dangerous people. We need to incentivise prisoners to turn their lives around. But we also need to punish people outside of prison as well. We need to work hard when we see the conclusions of that review.
We need to focus also on reducing reoffending, because 80% of offending is reoffending. As noble Lords challenged me to do, I need to focus on delivering these new prison places so we do not run out of space, but I also need to really focus on delivering reduced reoffending, so over time our prisons are less full because people are reoffending less.
As we all know, there is a very complex job to do. We are dealing with the most complex people in the country and a system that is the most complex. It is a privilege for me; it is my dream job to do this. I am looking forward in the new year to starting to deliver on my plans. We are now in a position where we have overcome the immediate capacity problems. We can use the headroom, even though we have only minuscule capacity space compared to the Spanish. It is important that we use that time to focus on education, purposeful activity, people addressing their drug and mental health problems, and helping them so that when they get out, they stay out.