Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate her Department has made of the male estate prison capacity in 2028.

This Government inherited a prison system in crisis due to the previous government only adding 500 places to the estate in 14 years. If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials. The police must halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished, and we face the breakdown of law and order in this country.

We are building the largest expansion of the prison estate since the Victorians, with 14,000 places by 2031. We have already delivered 2,400 places since taking office.

But it is clear that given the rate of demand, we cannot build our way out of this. As the Lord Chancellor set out this week on current forecasts by early 2028, we will be 9,500 places short without further action.

That is why she commissioned and published the Independent Sentencing Review to ensure that we never again run out of prison places and that there will always be space to lock up dangerous offenders.