Have Labour got a grip of the prisons crisis?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Labour are planning to publish a 10-year plan to get on the front foot when it comes to the prisons crisis. Shifting from the previous government’s preference to run the system hot to a policy of early release and carving out more places, the headline figure is that there will be 14,000 more prison places by 2031. But the fear today is that these won’t be enough to tackle the critical lack of space in UK jails. So, will Labour’s ongoing sentencing review advocate for greater leniency for certain offenders? And will the public see that as justice being served?

James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Danny Shaw, former adviser to Yvette Cooper.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You can get three months of The Spectator for just £15, plus a free bottle of Paul Roger champagne if you go to spectator.com.
0:07.1	UK forward slash FIS24. This offer is UK only and subject to availability.
0:17.2	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Searle. I'm joined today by The Spectators,
0:21.1	political editor Katie Poole, and Danny Shaw, former advisor to Vette Cooper.
0:25.0	Now, today the government has announced its plans to deal with the prisons crisis.
0:28.2	There's plans to build four new big prisons across the country over the coming years.
0:31.9	Katie, took us through the announcement by Shabana Amood, the Justice Secretary today.
0:35.7	So this is the 10-year strategy that
0:37.8	they're publishing and obviously one of the first acts of the Labour government was to release
0:42.1	a whole load of prisoners. This was not something they particularly wanted to do but they inherited
0:47.2	a situation of overcrowding as we discussed previously and as Liam Bruce Smith actually on a recent
0:52.7	coffee house shots that we published on Saturday,
0:55.6	soon next year for staff talked about, I think when it came to the options available,
0:59.3	the past government saw running the system hot and the potential problems that brings up
1:05.1	as preferable to releasing prisoners early.
1:08.1	The view of the Labour government, they came in is this is not sustainable.
1:11.1	What happens if there is an overspill potential riots and so forth? And therefore, you've
1:15.8	had two waves of releases. The 10-year strategy is Shabana Mead trying to get on the front foot
1:21.6	and say this is the longer-term plan for how we're going to deal with prisons. And as you say,
1:26.4	James, it's creating a few
1:27.8	new ones. That's going to mean 14,000 more prison places in England and Wales by 2031 if they
1:33.7	hit their target. And when Shabana Mahoud was talking about this morning and her media around,
	...

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