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Green rules cause delays to thousands of new prison cells, as soaring jail population threatens fresh crisis
28 January 2025, 17:21 | Updated: 28 January 2025, 17:58
The creation of thousands of new prison spaces in England and Wales has been held up by environmental regulations, as capacity continues to be squeezed behind bars.
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Speaking to MPs, the head of the prison service’s ‘Change’ project revealed nutrient neutrality rules have impacted “at least half a dozen projects” where cells are being built or renovated.
LBC has heard that despite measures last year to release some inmates early, there are only around 1600 spaces left in the male prison estate today.
But as planning authorities have been told to only approve new developments in some areas, where mitigations are in place to offset pollution, bosses say progress to ease the pressure has been hit.
Jim Barton told the Public Accounts Committee the regulations have potentially delayed thousands of prison places being brought into the system.
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Luke Charters, Labour MP for York Outer, who sits on the committee, told LBC: “It’s a farce that we care more in this country about newts, bats, and PH levels than we do about the perpetrators of crime.
“A planning issue has created a shortage of prison spaces and I’m fuming about it, because victims of crime deserve far much better.
“In Yorkshire, we’re common-sense folk and we’d say there has to be a balance, but we can’t be at the point where nutrient levels have more protection and more status than victims do.”
The prison population has been causing a headache for ministers for years. In 2020 and 2021, the Ministry of Justice, under the Conservatives, increased prison expansion plans from 13,400 to 20,000 additional places by the middle of the decade.
Since then, an increasing population of inmates on remand - waiting for a court date - and more criminals being locked up for longer sentences, has seen capacity strained to the point of crisis.
The early release scheme was introduced as a temporary measure, but Mark Icke, vice president of the Prison Governors Association, told LBC even now, the problem is getting worse.
“The population is already up about a whole prison - over 1000 people - since the turn of the year,” he said, “and that’s putting real pressure on the system.
“It only takes another critical maintenance issue to happen, with more capacity lost, and we’ve been saying that towards Easter or the summer, unless the sentencing review delivers real big-ticket items fast, we could be in another population crisis.”
Mark, who was previously the governor of HMP Swaleside, also echoed warnings about the maintenance on the existing prisons estate, saying the money put forward by the Chancellor in her budget “won’t even scratch the surface”.
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The most senior civil servant at the Ministry of Justice, Dame Antonia Romeo, yesterday told MPs: “It’s not enough. We need £2.8 billion to totally remediate and in the current [spending review] we were given between 220 and 300 million.
“We can all do the maths; we’re going to need a lot more money to begin to make inroads into the maintenance.”
Last year, prisons minister James Timpson warned that the ‘dilapidated’ state of ageing prisons was making it easier for drones to deliver drugs and weapons straight to cells, through broken windows.
The collapse of construction giant ISG in September last year is also understood to have delayed the renovation of some cells, as part of the project to create more capacity.
Jim Barton, Executive Director of HMPPS Change, told MPs when the company went bust, they left a crane in the middle of one of the jails they were working on.
He said: “We had a significant exposure to ISG. They were contracted across 13 projects adding up to around 3,500 places in which they had some involvement.
“In HMP Birmingham, the Victorian house blocks are being refurbed and we had a tower crane in the middle of the prison. We had to close that site overnight when ISG went into administration to make it safe.
“We’re now in the process with commercial colleagues to re-tender those 13 projects but we expect it will have a significant impact in terms of both cost - our estimate is around £300 million - and also delays.”
Nutrient neutrality regulations have also held up the development of new housing estates in England and Wales, with the housing minister Matthew Pennycook announcing a consultation into how they can be changed at a national level to unlock potential.
He told MPs last month: “There is widespread evidence that such requirements are unnecessarily deterring planning applications and hindering the pace at which homes and infrastructure in these catchment areas can be delivered.”
The government has also announced changes to how planning applications can be challenged in court, to help speed up the building of critical national infrastructure, such as railways, wind farms, and prisons.
A Government spokesperson said: “We recognise the challenges nutrient neutrality presents for development, including prisons.
"This is why we set out proposals in December for a new approach that would unlock development more quickly through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, to create a win-win outcome for the economy and for nature.”
