Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the forecasted cost to the public purse was of adding 20,000 places to the prison estate (a) in total and (b) per place in October 2021.

The Department’s estimate of the total cost of completing the additional 20,000 places to the prison estate at the point of the SR21 settlement was c.£5.2bn and this in turn equated to an average of c.£257k per place.