A Tory Minister has insisted the Covid pandemic is the primary cause for crowded prisons.
Lee Rowley, MP for North East Derbyshire, told a Question Time audience that the pandemic had swelled jail numbers due to the backlog of people waiting for their court cases to be heard, as well as delays in building more prisons or create more capacity in existing ones.
Presenter Fiona Bruce pointed out that the Conservative Party had pledged in its 2019 manifesto to create 10,000 more prison places, and in 2021, the party promised 20,000 extra slots by the mid 2020s. Only around 5,500 have so far been added.
But Housing Minister Mr Rowley said the pandemic was to blame for failing to hit either target – which was met by derision from the audience in Liverpool. He said: “We talk about what the problem is. The problem is a hangover from Covid. Sometimes politicians have to be clear… You can laugh or scoff, but the reality is that during Covid, when you take out a substantial proportion of your of your capacity in your courts for a while, there’s a backlog building up.
“So a backlog of people have built up within the system, including within jail. We were building 20,000 new places but then the spike happened after Covid, and we’re going to work through that. We’re trying to work through that, and that’s happening. It’s going to take time, and what politicians need to do is to say, ‘we’ve got a problem. Let’s work through it. Let’s put a plan in place to do that.'”
The debate came after it emerged that burglars and shoplifters are among prisoners who will be released two months early as the country runs out of spare jail cells. Ms Bruce alluded to this and called out the Tories for failing to reach targets set in manifestos, going back to 2019.
Mr Rowley said: “I mean, it takes a long time to build a prison. I’ve been involved, as you said, we want 20,000 and we’re doing that and we need to move forward. We’re making sure that more prison places come on.
“But whilst we’ve got a challenge of trying to work through this backlog, we have an issue, and what we have to do when we say we’ve got an issue, whether it’s in this part of public service or another, is have a plan, which is what we’re doing, building 20,000 places, and making sure that we implement that by the Government going back to square one.”
The MP had earlier come under fire on the topical show when a question was asked about his party’s stance on racism, following the Diane Abbott scandal. No one in the audience in Liverpool raised their hand when Ms Bruce asked who agreed with Michael Gove’s response to criticism around extremism. Mr Gove, 56, had said, under new definitions, extremists will be classed as those who destroy the freedom of others, try to replace parliamentary democracy and intentionally create a ‘permissive’ environment for others to do this.
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