Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent progress his Department has made on increasing prison capacity.

The Prime Minister has committed up to £2.5bn to transform the prison estate by creating 10,000 additional prison places as part of this government’s commitment to crack down on crime. These places will be modern, decent, safe and secure and will support offender rehabilitation.

Under our plans for the prison estate, additional capacity will be provided through our new prisons, refurbishments to existing accommodation and the creation of purpose-built houseblocks to manage the projected population increase and transform the estate.

This is on top of the c.3,500 places which we have begun at Wellingborough; that we will start building at Glen Parva later this year; and that we opened at HMP Stocken in June 2019.

In September 2019 we secured outline planning permission for a 1,440-place prison to be built at Full Sutton, the first prison of the 10,000 additional places, where we have available space next to the existing HMP Full Sutton. We also continue to undertake site searches and feasibility work for locations that could be used for future prison and houseblock construction.