Jake Richards

As I was saying before we were interrupted by votes, I want to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest, her team, and her neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Michael Payne), who has raised this issue with me. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest intimated in her opening speech, on the back of her representations I visited HMP Lowdham Grange in April. I had an important meeting with the governor and her leadership team where I raised many of the concerns raised by my hon. Friend and was reassured to a large degree. I felt that the leadership team there understood the issues and were working at pace to attempt to address them. However, I also want to place on record that I challenged the team about the work that needs to be done. We have seen in the report published yesterday that although there have been improvements, there is absolutely no doubt that there is a long way to go. I hope that the governor and the leadership team at HMP Lowdham Grange would agree with that. There is more work to do there and elsewhere. Poor safety in our prisons fundamentally reflects a system under strain. In the summer of 2024, this Government inherited a prison system that was in crisis—in utter collapse—and very soon to run out of places completely. Too many prisons are still struggling at or near capacity, with an increased risk of violence hampering their efforts to turn offenders’ lives around, as we have heard. I will go on to address some of the particular issues, but we have taken fundamental action to reduce the risk linked to capacity challenges. Ultimately, we can only do all the good work on reoffending, education and rehabilitation if we have a functioning prison system. That is why we are delivering 14,000 new prison places—the biggest expansion of the estate since the Victorian era. We are investing £4.7 billion in that prison-building programme over the next four years, and we introduced landmark sentencing reforms in the Sentencing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent earlier this year, to finally put the prison system on a sustainable footing for the future. That Act was not easy. Difficult decisions have been made, but that legislation means that we can reassure the British public, for the first time in essentially a generation, that there will always be prison spaces for offenders when we need them. However, there is much more to be done on rehabilitation, education and mental health support. I accept that absolutely.