Laundry rooms, storage and unused offices to be converted to cells in bid to tackle prison overcrowding crisis
The Government has to get 'creative' to create more spaces, the Justice Secretary said.
The Government will turn laundry rooms into prison cells in a bid to tackle overcrowding in Britain’s jails, Justice Secretary Alex Norris has announced.
Listen to this article
Speaking to LBC on Tuesday, Mr Norris said the Government has to get “creative “ in order to free up spaces amid a crisis in the prisons system.
Hundreds of places would be created by converting existing spaces inside prisons into accommodation, he claimed.
Shared-use areas, offices, and laundry rooms could all be converted under the plans.
Mr Norris told Nick Ferrari at Breakfast: "We're going to use creatively across the prison estate, whether it's office space or laundry space There's lots and lots of sort of empty space. It is functional, but we're finding that balance between, you know, those day-to-day functions and the need to have enough places to convert them where we can into usable cell space.
"I wouldn't want to go laundry room by laundry room around the prison estate, but there are creative ways.”
The Government will also speed up its building of hundreds of extra prison places with £110 million of investment, Mr Norris will announce in Parliament on Tuesday.
He will also set out to MPs details of an early-release scheme designed to prevent prisons from running out of space, as polling showed nearly two thirds of Britons opposed the initiative.
Wider plans – including building entire new prisons – would see 14,000 new places on top of the 3,200 prison places delivered in the last two years.
Elsewhere, ministers have signed a contract which will pave the way for a new 1,700-place prison in Lancashire.
Over the weekend, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that the killers of Thames Valley police officer Andrew Harper will not be eligible for early release, following a backlash.
Mr Burnham initially resisted calls to limit the scheme further after it emerged that Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, who were convicted of Pc Harper’s manslaughter in 2020, would be eligible from next year.
But under fresh changes announced on Sunday, anyone convicted of unlawful killing – including all forms of manslaughter and death by dangerous driving – will be excluded from the next round of early releases, which begins in October.
Some 5,000 prisoners had been due to be released early from October under plans to ease jail overcrowding, down from 6,000 after ministers intervened to exempt rapists and “serious” child sex offenders.