At the MoJ briefing Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, spoke after the presentation from Amy Rees. (See 3.52pm.)
She started by saying she could make a political point that Rees could not.
It is shameful that this country in 2025 finds itself in this cycle of crisis. It is shameful that for so long the last Conservative governmen failed to reckon with the reality of a rising prison population.
When Labour was lost in government, we increased prison capacity by 28,000 places. In their 14 years in power, the Conservatives added just 500 additional places, leaving our prisons on the brink of collapse.
Mahmood said the government has committed to creating more prison space.
Last December we published a long-term building strategy setting out our aim to open up 14,000 prison places by 2031. This is the largest expansion of the prison estate since the Victorians.
We have already committed £2.3bn pounds to prison expansion, and since taking office, we have delivered 2,400 new places.
We will now go further. While the spending review is ongoing, I can announce today that the Treasury will fund our prison expansion plans in full across the spending review period. This is a total capital investment of £4.7bn. It allows us to start building three new prisons.
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Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has claimed that Keir Starmer’s immigration speech on Monday shows he seems to be “learning a very great deal from us”. (See 12.25pm.)
For a full list of all the stories covered here today, scroll through the key events timeline at the top of the blog.
Here are more extracts from the speech by Amy Rees, the interim permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, at the start of her MoJ press conference with Shabana Mahmood.
On how the prison population has grown over time
In 1993, the population was less than half its current level – at around 40,000 prisoners.
When I first joined the Service, in 2001, it was 65,000.
In recent years, it has accelerated rapidly to its current levels, and is forecast to be more than 100,000 by 2029.
The primary cause of this is clear.
Sentence lengths have increased considerably.
In 2005, the average custodial sentence was 13 months.
By 2023, it was 21 months – a 66 percent increase.
We now have a larger population of sentenced prisoners in our prisons – serving longer sentences than they used to.
On how recall numbers have increased (which is why Mahmood announced measures to day to reduce these figures – see 4.16pm)
The number of offenders brought back to prison after being released – known as recall – is a significant, though lesser, contributing factor [to rising prison numbers]
In 1993, this ‘recalled’ population in prison was virtually non-existent at just 100 prisoners.
By 2018, it was 6,000.
And since then, levels have soared – more than doubling to 13,600 in March this year.
On how successive governments have responded to prison overcrowding
Until now, successive governments have attempted to manage prison capacity primarily by carrying out early releases.
In late 2023, the prison system was running at around 99 percent of its capacity.
Faced with the prospect of running out of prison places altogether, the End of Custody Supervised Licence Scheme was introduced in October 2023.
This meant eligible prisoners were automatically released up to 18 days before their scheduled released date, later increased to 35 days and then up to 70 days in May 2024.
This measure prevented prisons from running out of places entirely, but it only bought the service time.
By July last year, prisons were again operating close to maximum capacity.
Ministers announced plans for some prisoners serving standard determinate sentences to be released automatically at the 40 percent point of their sentence, rather than 50 percent.
A surge of these releases took place over two tranches in the autumn and again prevented prisons from filling up entirely.
In parallel, we have brought in other smaller-scale measures to manage capacity.
This includes moving some risk-assessed offenders out of prison and onto Home Detention – tagged and curfewed for a longer period.
On what would happen if the government does not take further action
If Operation Early Dawn [see 3.52pm] is unable to manage the flow of prisoners, the situation becomes intolerable.
We would, at this stage, see the managed breakdown of the criminal justice system.
Police holding cells would be full, and the police would be faced with being unable to make arrests.
Courts would need to consider bail for offenders they would normally consider dangerous enough to remand to prison.
If the system reaches that point, there would be a clear risk to public safety and the only solution would be rapid emergency releases.
This would mean offenders being let out of prison without time for probation officers and other services to put in place release plans designed to protect the public.
And even this would only buy us time.
The prison population will keep rising.
Without a long-term plan, sooner or later we would run out of places once more.
That is the situation in the prison service as it stands today.
The Howard League for Penal Reform has responded to Shabana Mahmood’s press conference by tweeting a link to a briefing paper it produced on prison overcrowding, and why it thinks building more jails is not the answer.
Here are texts of the speeches given by Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, and her interim permanent secretary, Amy Rees, at their press conference.
Here is a recent Guardian video on the prison overcrowding crisis.
Q: As a West Midlands MP (just as Enoch Powell was a West Midlands MP), are you happy to use the words of the PM about the risk of Britain becoming an island of strangers?
Mahmood replied:
I agree with the prime minister that without curbs on migration, without making sure that we have strong rules that everyone follows, and that we have a pace of immigration that allows for integration into our country, we do risk becoming a nation of people estranged from one another. And what he has described is something that I absolutely believe in, which are the values of the Labour party, which is a desire to see this country as a nation of neighbours.
Asked again if she would use the term “island of strangers”, Mahmood again said there was a risk of Britain coming a country where people were “more estranged from one another”.
Q: Will you need to legislate for the new sentencing rules?
Mahmood said the government would have to legislate. But it would legislate “at pace”.
She said she expected changes from a sentencing bill to come into force from April next year.
Q: If you make more use of community sentences, how can you be sure that tags will work? In the past it has not worked?
Mahmood said the tech does work.
But she admitted there was a problem last year with Serco, the company overseeing the tagging programme.
But the tech definitely works, she said. She said a study published last week showed it can cut reoffending by 20%.
Q: Will domestic abuse offenders benefit from the changes to recall rules? And will prolific offenders benefit too?
Mahmood said people committing a serious further offence will be excluded.
Q: Under your plans for community sentences, if somone is just at home watching Neflix, is that really a punishment?
Mahmood said jail, and being on a tag, were both a curtailment of liberty. And that is a punishment, she said.
Q: This government has buckled before undre pressure from people like Nigel Farage. Are you willing to be unpopular?
Mahmood said she was “prepared to do whatever it takes to keep this country safe, to make sure that we never run out of prison, places, and that we never see the collapse of either the prison system, or our wider law and order system in this country”.
Mahmood took questions at the briefing.
Q: How many people will affected by the recall changes?
Mahmood said this would create around 1,400 prison places.
She said this would tied the system over from November until the spring, when the impact of new sentencing rules would start to take effect.
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