PRISONS – A TOP PRIORITY FOR LABOUR

Charley Allan on how the new Justice Secretary exposed the truth about the Tories’ ‘ticking time-bomb’

Even before Labour’s landslide election victory on 4 July, it was clear the new government would treat prisons as a top priority, with Keir Starmer’s powerful chief of staff Sue Gray identifying the capacity crisis as a so-called “black swan” – a potential disaster that could disrupt the administration’s early days.

Although prisons – and law and order, more widely – were hardly mentioned during the election campaign, both main parties were acutely aware of how desperate the situation had become. Alex Chalk, the former Justice Secretary, spent his final months in office pleading with No 10 to push his Sentencing Bill, which, among other measures, allowed for release up to six months early on strict tagging – something the right of his party refused to stomach.

One of the new Labour government’s first announcements was the reduction in time served from 50% of a sentence to 40%, known as SDS40 after Standard Determinate Sentences, from September – a move Chalk was openly advocating as he unsuccessfully sought re-election.

Labour also ended the End of Custody Supervised Licence scheme – condemned as ‘dysfunctional and unmanageable’ by the new-look Ministry of Justice (MOJ) – which started at 18 days’ early release when launched in October 2023, but extended to 70 days the following May.

Announcing SDS40 in her first speech as Justice Secretary on 12 July, before the new parliament had even opened, Shabana Mahmood described prisons as a ‘time-bomb’ ready to explode, a warning made by the POA many times to her and the previous government.

A week later, to the House of Commons, Mahmood expanded on this in her first Ministerial Statement: ‘Since this government took office two weeks ago, it has become clear that our prisons are in crisis and are at the point of collapse. The male prison estate has been running at more than 99% capacity for the past 18 months.

‘We now know that my predecessor warned No 10 Downing Street, but, rather than address this crisis, the former Prime Minister called an election, leaving a ticking time-bomb. If that bomb were to go off – if our prisons were to run out of space – the courts would grind to a halt, suspects could not be held in custody, and police officers would be unable to make arrests, leaving criminals free to act without consequence. In short, if we fail to act now, we face the prospect of a total breakdown of law and order.’

These are strong words from the Secretary of State, and a welcome dose of government honesty and realism. Quite hypocritically, former Prisons Minister Edward Argar, now Shadow Justice Secretary, responded by claiming his party had ‘significant public protection concerns’ about the measures – taking no responsibility or offering any apology for the mess he left us in.

Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell declared his honorary life membership of the POA and pointed out that the last Tory government had ‘brought about a staffing crisis in our prisons that has brought rehabilitation to an end and levels of violence that we have never seen before’, asking: ‘Will she [the Secretary of State] bring forward, as soon as possible, a workforce strategy for our prisons and probation?’

Responding, Mahmood pointed out that, ‘when prisons are so badly overcrowded, it is incredibly difficult to run any kind of regime that can do good work on rehabilitation or provide a safe atmosphere for the staff who work in them’, adding that she was ‘committed to publishing our 10-year capacity strategy as quickly as possible, so that we can begin the process of returning our system to some sort of health’.

The statement was repeated the following week in the Upper House by Prisons Minister James Timpson, the cobbling magnate newly elevated to the Lords in a surprise, but widely respected, move by Starmer. Responding for the Tory Opposition, former Minister Lord Stewart of Dirleton seemed more concerned about Mahmood’s ‘stale, clichéd [and] tired language’ – clearly her talk of ‘ticking time-bombs’ and ‘the guilty men’ had got under his skin.

Lord Browne of Ladyton, a former Home Office Minister under New Labour, highlighted how, ‘speaking to Channel 4 News earlier this year, my noble friend [Lord Timpson] said that, in his view, only one-third of people in prison needed to be there’, and that, ‘in order to emphasise that radically reducing the prison population is not impossible, he added that the Netherlands had halved its prison population while reducing crime’.

But Timpson replied: ‘Before we look at any other countries and international comparisons, we need to fix the system we have first. Before we can do anything on reducing reoffending and having prisons we are proud of, we need to stabilise the system. It is our first priority. We need to fix it, and we need to fix the capacity so that we do not have this problem again.

‘We need to enable our fantastic staff in our prisons and probation services to do what they want to do, to put the building blocks in place so people who go to prison have a much better chance of not going back.’

The following day, Mahmood moved the secondary legislation to launch SDS40. Debating the measure, new Labour MP Mark Ferguson insisted: ‘I am sure many of us will have been appalled by the comments of the former Lord Chancellor [Alex Chalk], who said that the measure this government is taking was not taken by the last government because “you have to win votes”.’

Mahmood replied: ‘We do have to win votes – it is a democracy, at the end of the day – but we must also govern the country in a way that does not risk the total collapse of the criminal justice system. It is a sign of the Tory Party’s collective nervous breakdown in government that the risk of running the criminal justice system into the ground, with the total collapse of law and order in this country, was allowed to happen in the first place.’

She continued: ‘The last occupants of 10 Downing Street left our prisons in crisis. They left our criminal justice system at the point of collapse. They were the guilty men – I know the historical weight of those words, but they are apt. The last government placed the country in unconscionable peril.’

Mahmood is correct, but it will take a complete change in attitude by the MOJ and HMPPS – crucially, treating the POA as part of the solution, rather than the problem – for Labour to make prisons safe again and clean up this toxic Tory mess.