Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison cells have been built in each year since 2010, broken down by cell type.

As some cells hold more than one person, the operational capacity of the prison estate is best understood by the number of places rather than number of cells, and this is how data is recorded by HMPPS.

The below table provides a summary of the number of prison places which have opened in each year since 2010, broken down into Adult Male, Female and CYPSE (Children and Young People’s Estate). Please note that, for simplicity, all places relating to a prison opening are included in the year that the prison opened. In practice, a new prison may take more than a year before reaching its final operational capacity.

We continue to push ahead with the largest prison expansion programme since the Victorian Era – with 10,000 of the pledged 20,000 additional places to be delivered by the end of 2025.

We have also put in place short-term measures across the prison estate to expand capacity by the equivalent of around 2,000 places since September 2022, through doubling up cells and delaying non-urgent maintenance work where safe to do so. Thousands of places are also being created through the expansion of prisons through additional house blocks and major refurbishments at existing prisons and we are rolling out Rapid Deployment Cells across the estate, with c.590 already delivered at eleven sites.