The justice system was facing ‘total gridlock’ next year as Labour inherited ‘completely unrealistic’ plans to tackle prison capacity. This was the bleak assessment offered by the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in a new report on prison capacity published this morning.

The PAC reports that, despite Keir Starmer’s early release scheme, the Ministry of Justice forecasts prisons will run out of capacity by early 2026. Men’s prisons have been operating at a ‘98% to 99.7%’ occupancy between October 2022 and August last year but remained ‘alarmingly full’. ‘Overcrowding is endemic, staff are overburdened and access to services and purposeful activity is poor,’ said the PAC. The efforts of prison staff to ‘avert disaster‘ were ‘admirable’ but said ‘this state of crisis’ undermined efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce reoffending as well as offering ‘poor value for money for the taxpayer’.

Plans to deliver 20,000 additional places in England and Wales by the mid 2020s have been delayed by approximately five years until 2031 and would cost at least £4.2 billion. According to the PAC, the government’s plans were ‘unrealistic’ – as of September 2024, the prison service had delivered just 6,518 additional places and its plans to deliver the remaining 14,000 were ‘subject to significant risk’.

The PAC chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP warned that ‘severely overcrowded prisons’ were in danger of becoming ‘pressure cookers’. ‘Vital rehabilitative work providing purposeful activity including retraining would help to cut high rates of reoffending – but this work is sidelined as staff are forced to focus on maintaining control of increasingly unsafe environments,’ he continued. ‘Many prisoners themselves are living in simply inhumane conditions, with their health needs often overlooked.’

Sir Geoffrey said that the MoJ was ‘grappling with the fallout of problems it should have predicted’. ‘Lives are being put at increasing risk by the Government’s historic failures to increase capacity. Despite the recent emergency release of thousands of prisoners, the system still faces total gridlock in a matter of months. It is now for the Government to act on the recommendations in our report if disaster is to be averted.’

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies welcomed what they called ‘a forensic demolition job’ on failed government attempts to ‘build their way out of recurring prison crises’.
‘Successive governments have tried, and failed, to build their way out of prisons capacity crises created by bad legislation and poor decisions by ministers,’ said the centre’s director Richard Garside. ‘… Rather than repeating all the mistakes of the past, the government should develop a long-term plan to contain and then reduce the prison population. This would allow it to close the gap between the money allocated and the costs of building, running and maintaining prisons.

Andrea Coomber KC, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said prisons were ‘overwhelmed’. ‘At the end of January, almost 70 prisons in England and Wales were holding more people than they were designed to accommodate, and about 20 more were operating at 95% to 99% capacity. It is no coincidence that violence and self-harm are at endemic levels.’
Sentencing reform was ‘urgent’, Coomber argued, adding that ‘the billions earmarked for building new prisons would be better spent on securing an effective and responsive probation service, working to cut crime in the community’.