Emergency jail launch was a one off, minister vows – however different concepts are on desk

Labour’s Justice Secretary has pledged there will be no repeat of this year’s emergency prison releases.

Shabana Mahmood said she would not be announcing any more emergency programmes “of the kind” seen since she took office. Thousands of inmates are being released after serving just 40% of their sentences in order to free up over 5,000 places amid fears of jails running out of space.

Ms Mahmood told Sky News: “I’m not going to do any more emergency releases of the kind either that I’ve had to do at the beginning or as the last Conservative government did with their early release scheme as well. I want to avoid that scenario. We will not be doing that.”

She said ministers are instead looking at measures such as home detention curfew to ease the strain on the prison system after years of Tory neglect.

It comes as the Government has announced it intends to create 14,000 more prison spaces by 2031. Ms Mahmood appeared to accept this might mean overruling objections of local communities in order to fast-track jails.

Asked if she would do so, the frontbencher said: “Yes, so our manifesto commitment was that we consider prisons to be of national importance. These are critical infrastructure projects, they are absolutely necessary to make sure the country doesn’t run out of prison places.”

The Government said a massive £2.3billion will go towards building jails as part of a 10-year strategy to deal with prison overcrowding. Labour hit out at the Tories’ “gross negligence” in failing to deal with crumbling prisons as it vowed to create 14,000 jail spaces to ensure the public is safe.

She went on to tell Times Radio: “The number of prison places in this country is going to go up and we will make sure that it goes up and the prison population will rise. This is about getting us onto a sustainable footing in the long term.

“It’s not an ideological question about who goes to prison and who doesn’t… We are going to have to expand the use of punishment outside of prison in a way that the public can have confidence in, where we can supervise and manage offenders properly outside of prison and then run an overall system that is obviously much more sustainable.”