Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Patrick Spencer and Shabana Mahmood

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

9. What steps her Department is taking to increase prison capacity.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Shabana Mahmood)]

We took immediate action to prevent the collapse of the prison system by changing the automatic release point for standard determinate sentences. We are building 14,000 new prison places and we will publish our 10-year capacity strategy shortly, which will set out exactly where and by when we will get the places that we need. The previous Government left prisons in crisis. We will fix them for good with that capacity strategy and the independent review of sentencing.

[Patrick Spencer]

I welcome what this Government are doing to increase prison capacity, but what will the Secretary of State do on tougher sentencing? If she goes to my constituency of Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, she will be met with a tough, gruff East Anglian accent that says, “What’s the point of building prison places if you are not going to use them?”

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am sure the hon. Member’s constituents will also recognise that, even with the new supply that we are building, we will still run out of prison places, as the demand in the system is much greater than the building planned. We simply cannot build our way out of this problem, so to make sure that there is always a prison place for the people who need to be locked up and that we never run out of prison places again, we need an independent review of sentencing.