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The government admits prisons in England and Wales are close to breaking point, partly due to changes in sentencing rules designed to ensure serious offenders stay behind bars longer.
In an interview with Sky News on Thursday, Health Secretary Steve Barclay refused to confirm or deny a report in The Times that prisons were so overcrowded that a circuit court judge had ordered a delay from next week. Sentencing of convicted criminals on bail.
Lord Justice Eddy, the senior presiding judge in England and Wales, also told judges to use cells at the magistrates’ court to hold suspects charged with the most serious crimes and remanded in custody, The Times reported.
Asked about the reports, Barclays said: “As a rule, ministers do not comment on leaks. The Chancellor will make a statement to Parliament on Monday.”
On whether prisons were reaching capacity, he said prisons were “under huge pressure”, partly due to the government ensuring prisoners were kept “for longer” and “the pressures of Covid”.
Official figures released on October 6 showed the prison population at 88,016, just 651 below the “available operating capacity” of 88,667. The number of parking spaces dropped from 768 the previous week to 2,261 during the same period in 2022.
The Ministry of Justice said there had been an unprecedented growth in the prison population following the coronavirus pandemic and lawyers’ strike, with 15,500 prisoners awaiting trial, 6,000 more than those on remand before the coronavirus outbreak.
The situation is exacerbated by the higher number of offenders behind bars this year than in previous years.
Meanwhile, the average prison sentence has increased 57 percent since 2010 due to sentencing adjustments designed to ensure felons spend longer in prison.
“Our priority is to keep the public safe from dangerous offenders,” the Ministry of Justice said. “That’s why we ended automatic halfway release for serious sexual and violent offenders and increased the average jail time by three years.”
It added that the Prison Service was doubling down on cell occupancy, deferring non-urgent maintenance work to bring hundreds of cells back into use and moving lower-risk offenders to higher-capacity open prisons.
In the longer term, the government has embarked on expansion plans that will include building six new prisons to create an additional 20,000 places.
Justice Secretary Alex Chalke revealed this month that the government was also in “exploratory discussions” with continental European countries about renting prison space abroad.
The dispute over prison capacity comes as court backlogs reach record levels. Figures published on Thursday showed that there were 65,004 cases pending at the Crown Courts of England and Wales at the end of August, a 7% increase on the same period in 2022.
Ministers pledged to reduce the backlog.
Nick Emerson, president of the Law Society, which represents lawyers in England and Wales, said both victims and defendants had been waiting for years for the case to go to trial.
“As the crisis in our criminal justice system worsens, the backlog in our courts is actually increasing, not decreasing,” Emerson said.
Harvey Redgrave, head of home affairs at the Tony Blair Institute think tank, said the court system would not be able to cope if the recent recruitment of 20,000 police officers resulted in rising charge rates. But if the court backlog is cleared, prisons will be overwhelmed.
He described plans to lease prison space overseas as “a sticking plaster at best”.
Commenting on reports that judges have been ordered to delay sentencing, he said: “Rapists and burglars are able to escape jail because of overcrowding, which highlights the dire state of our criminal justice system.”
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