Prison Maintenance: Insourcing

Lord Woodley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Woodley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the potential merits of insourcing all prison maintenance.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)]

The Government are committed to ensuring that there are professional facility management services across our prison estate. A 2023 assessment conducted in partnership with the Cabinet Office determined that an insourced solution was not the preferred option for future prison maintenance services. Financial analysis determined that an outsourced option would be more cost-effective and would deliver the best value for money. The Government have therefore initiated a programme of work that will put in place new contracts for the provision of maintenance services for prisons, which are being competitively tendered. However, I am keeping this approach under constant review to ensure we get the best value for taxpayers’ money.

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for his response, but it is undeniable that a decade of prison maintenance privatisation has been an absolute disaster. A disgraceful experiment has gone badly wrong and it blights the lives of everyone living and working in prisons. Does he agree that it is more than time to kick out the incompetent and greedy privateers and bring maintenance back in-house, which is far more cost-effective, and make much more use of works departments to give prisoners valuable extra skills through in-house maintenance and light repairs? I think this is called Q-Branch.