Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood says government has agreed funding for three new prisons
At the MoJ briefing Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, spoke after the presentation from Amy Rees. (See 3.52pm.)
She started by saying she could make a political point that Rees could not.
It is shameful that this country in 2025 finds itself in this cycle of crisis. It is shameful that for so long the last Conservative governmen failed to reckon with the reality of a rising prison population.
When Labour was lost in government, we increased prison capacity by 28,000 places. In their 14 years in power, the Conservatives added just 500 additional places, leaving our prisons on the brink of collapse.
Mahmood said the government has committed to creating more prison space.
Last December we published a long-term building strategy setting out our aim to open up 14,000 prison places by 2031. This is the largest expansion of the prison estate since the Victorians.
We have already committed £2.3bn pounds to prison expansion, and since taking office, we have delivered 2,400 new places.
We will now go further. While the spending review is ongoing, I can announce today that the Treasury will fund our prison expansion plans in full across the spending review period. This is a total capital investment of £4.7bn. It allows us to start building three new prisons.
Key events
Mahmood says Gauke review will lead to reduction in length of some sentences
Shabana Mahmood went on to say that building new prisons alone would not deal with the problem.
She confirmed that a review of prisons sentences, being conducted by the former Tory justice secretary David Gauke, will lead to sentences for some offenders being reduced.
She said:
I cannot and will not get ahead of [the Gauke review’s] recommendations, but let me be clear about the task that they have been set. The sentencing review must ensure there is always space in prison for dangerous offenders.
To achieve this, the panel will have to recommend a reduction in the length of some custodial sentences and an expansion of prison outside a prison for those offenders who can be managed in the community.
At the same time, I have set David a clear condition. We must protect the public in whatever measures we pursue.
Mahmood said she and Gauke visited Texas earlier this year where they saw how a system offering early release for good behaviour is working. And technology can transform community punishment, she said.
We are entering the world where Tech has the potential to impose a digital prison outside a prison, surveilling offenders even more closely than they can be watched in jail.
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood says government has agreed funding for three new prisons
At the MoJ briefing Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, spoke after the presentation from Amy Rees. (See 3.52pm.)
She started by saying she could make a political point that Rees could not.
It is shameful that this country in 2025 finds itself in this cycle of crisis. It is shameful that for so long the last Conservative governmen failed to reckon with the reality of a rising prison population.
When Labour was lost in government, we increased prison capacity by 28,000 places. In their 14 years in power, the Conservatives added just 500 additional places, leaving our prisons on the brink of collapse.
Mahmood said the government has committed to creating more prison space.
Last December we published a long-term building strategy setting out our aim to open up 14,000 prison places by 2031. This is the largest expansion of the prison estate since the Victorians.
We have already committed £2.3bn pounds to prison expansion, and since taking office, we have delivered 2,400 new places.
We will now go further. While the spending review is ongoing, I can announce today that the Treasury will fund our prison expansion plans in full across the spending review period. This is a total capital investment of £4.7bn. It allows us to start building three new prisons.
MoJ warns of risk of ‘managed breakdown of criminal justice system’ because jails will run out of space in November
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is holding a press conference about the prison overcrowding crisis. It opened with a briefing from Amy Rees, the interim permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice.
Rees said the prison service would run out of space for adult male prisoners in November. She said:
The total prison population is 88,087 and the adult male estate is operating at approximately 99% of its capacity every year.
On our current trajectory, the prison population rises by 3,000, and now we expect to hit zero capacity, to entirely run out of prison places for adult men, in November of this year.
She said the early release measures announced by the government last year “only bought the [prison] service time”. And she said that recently the government has come close to reactivating Operation Early Dawn, an emergency system involving prisoners being held in police stations and court hearings being held up to relieve the pressure on prisons.
Rees said:
If capacity gets even tighter, as an exceptional measure, we would activate Operation Early Dawn. This means we convene a team at 5.30am every day to track each individual potentially coming into custody so that we can make sure there will be an available space for them.
Early dawn was activated between August 9 to September 9 last year prior to the implementation of early releases.
It was also previously activated in October 2023, March 2024 and May 2024.
In recent weeks, we have come close to activating Early Dawn once again.
Rees also said, if this did not work, the government would face “the managed breakdown of the criminal justice system”.
If Operation Early Dawn is unable to manage the flow of prisoners, the situation becomes intolerable. We would at this stage, see the managed breakdown of the criminal justice system.
A reader asks:
I would have expected that given their tiny presence in the Commons, Reform would have struggled to secure many of the hotly-contested question slots in PMQs.
But they seem to get a question every week. Is Lindsay Hoyle correct to so regularly include them? Isn’t he required to select according to parties’ size in the house?
There is a lottery for questions, and Reform UK seem to do quite well, proportionately. It may be the case that Tory MPs are not assiduous about all putting their names down for a question. But to be sure, you would have to check the data, and I’m not aware of anyone having gone to the bother of doing that
With the leaders from the smaller parties (SNP, Greens, Reform), the Speaker also tends to grant them a question every few weeks in recognition of their status. Farage got one of these questions two weeks ago.
But those party leaders can also enter the ballot for a question, and today Farage was called because he put his name down and did well in the shuffle.
UK could be buying more wood pellets from US for Drax biomass power station, Trump’s agriculture secretary signals
Helena Horton
Helena Horton is a Guardian environment reporter.
The UK could buy more wood pellets from the US for the Drax biomass power station in north Yorkshire, Brooke Rollins, US agriculture secretary, has suggested.
Speaking to reporters in London, Rollins said she had convinced energy Secretary Ed Miliband to take more of the
These are used to power the Drax power station – even though environmental experts have claimed is unsustainable because burning wood emits carbon and the pellets used to power it are shipped across the ocean.
The Drax plant accounts for around 6% of the UK’s electricity supply but it had its subsidies halved last year, and it was directed by government to only use sustainable wood. Last year, Drax was forced to pay £25m to the energy regulator Ofgem after it was found to have submitted inaccurate data on the sourcing of its wood pellets. There have been reports some of the pellets used in the power station have been from rare forests.
Rollins said:
We are 100% confident that [the wood pellets] does meet your sustainability requirements here in this country yesterday. That was one of the key things that I spoke to [Miliband and energy minister Michael Shanks] about. And they agreed.
I don’t want to get ahead of them, but in that meeting they felt fully assured that what we are doing in America does meet your sustainability requirements. In fact, we could potentially be opening up more markets for our wood pellets into the UK, as other countries that you’re importing here into this country are clearly not meeting those marks.
The government is expected to announced that it will allow foreign state investors to own up to a 15% state in British newspapers, Sky News reports. In his story, Mark Kleinman says this would allow the sale of the Daily Telegraph to go through.
Labour peer apologises for writing to Treasury to promote crypto firm he advised
Iain McNicol, a Labour peer and trade envoy for Keir Starmer, has apologised for breaking the House of Lords code of conduct by writing to the Treasury to promote a cryptocurrency firm that was paying him, Rowena Mason reports.
Minister faces anger from Labour MPs over Gaza as he sidesteps question about whether genocide taking place
Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister, has been criticised in the Commons by Labour MPs who believe the government is being too tolerant of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
In response to a Commons urgent question on “the UK’s assessment of the likelihood of genocide in Gaza”, Falconer said: “Israel’s denial of aid is appalling.”
But Labour MPs shouted “or what” as Falconer said the UK was calling on the Israeli government to allow humanitarian organisations to save lives.
The UQ was tabled by the Green MP Adrian Ramsay, who asked if the government agreed with Tom Fletcher, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator (and a former No 10 adviser) that genocide in Gaza is possible. Ramsay said Israel’s aid blockade was to blame for people starving.
In his reponse, on the issue of whether Israel was committing genocide, Falconer said this was a matter still being determined by the international court of justice. But he said Fletcher’s testimony was “incredibly important”.
On aid, he said:
Tonnes of food are currently sitting rotting at the Gaza-Israel border blocked from reaching people who are starving.
Israeli ministers have said Israel’s decision to block this aid is a pressure lever. This is cruel and it is indefensible. Overnight, yet more Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes. This must end. The message yesterday was clear. The world demands Israel stop and change course immediately.
With our allies, we are telling the government of Israel – lift the block on aid entering Gaza now, enable the UN and all humanitarians to save lives now, we need an immediate ceasefire now.
This prompted shouting from Labour MPs who wanted to know what the government would do if Israel took no notice.
In a subsequent question, the Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan said:
Almost a million children at risk of famine and death in Gaza. Those who have stood by and allowed this to happen should hold their heads in shame. I call on this government to sanction Israeli officials until the blockade is lifted because if we do not act now this will be on us.
And the Labour MP Andy McDonald said:
The minister has repeatedly said that we do everything to observe international law. Will he please accept that there is a growing body of opinion that says the UK is not doing that: we’re not complying with our obligations and we are not doing so if we continue to supply parts to the F-35 programme, these are the weapons that are dropping on children in Gaza?
We cannot say we’re observing the genocide and Geneva conventions and Rome statute if we continue to supply those goods.
Falconer told McDonald he did not accept the premise of his questions.
On the F-35 programme, he said that the UK was not selling the jets directly to Israel, that it was supplying spare parts in accordance with legal advice and that the F-35 programme was of “critical importance to European security”.
The Tory MP Edward Leigh asked Falconer to accept that “many friends of Israel worldwide, notwithstanding narrow legal depositions, are asking this moral question – when is genocide not genocide?”
Falconer said the government “will not move towards making determinations from despatch boxes on questions of legal determination”.
This is what Wes Streeting, the health secretary, told the comedian and podcaster Matt Forde at an event on Monday about Reform UK being the main threat to Labour. As HuffPost UK reports, Streeting said:
I think there’s a genuine question if people are less cynical about [Nigel] Farage than they used to be.
Let’s not forget that – for whatever I might think of him and his politics and what he has done to our country – he is objectively one of the most formidable campaigners in British politics.
So we should not underestimate him and we should not underestimate Reform.
I genuinely think that Reform is now Labour’s main opposition in the country, and there is a realignment on the right of British politics, of a type we haven’t seen since about a century ago since Labour supplanted the Liberals as the challengers on the centre left. And I think something similar is happening on the right.
PMQs – snap verdict
Today felt like one of those PMQs where we actually learned something substantial and important: Keir Starmer has given up on the Tories as the prime threat to Labour, and is more focused on Reform UK.
To be fair, this is something he has started saying explicity. In an interview with the Sun on Sunday at the weekend, Starmer said that even before the local elections he was “planning on the basis we were likely to be facing Reform at the next election in any event”. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said much the same in an interview with Matt Forde, as HuffPost reports today. Given what the opinion polls are recording, it would be surprising if Starmer were not thinking this way.
But just talking about the Conservative party no longer being the principal strategic opponent is one thing; acting as if you believe it is another, and that is what we saw from Starmer today. In his responses to Badenoch, there was a level of weariness and disdain that felt new. Here is one of his replies:
She must be the only person left in the country who thinks the economy was booming after the last government. We’ve created new jobs, record investment, trade deals that they tried, the India deal, I think they tried for eight years and failed. We did that deal. They talked about a US deal. We did that deal.
She says she is against the India deal, even though it has got the same provision she put on the table. She is against the US deal, even though it saves thousands of jobs in car manufacturing. Most absurdly she says she’s going to rip up the EU deal when she hasn’t even seen what’s on the page.
A once great political party is sliding into braindead oblivion.
Here is another.
I think she just said a tiny tariff deal. Can I suggest she gets the train to Solihull, two hours, go to speak to the workforce at JLR, their families, their communities, to tell them she would rip up the deal that protects their jobs.
And when she’s done that she might travel across to Scunthorpe and tell the steelworkers there she’s going to rip up the deal that saves their jobs, and then if she’s got time she can go up to Scotland and talk to the whisky distilleries, tell them she’d rip up the deal that’s creating 1,200 jobs for them, boosting their exports, and then come back here next week and tell us what reaction she got.
And here is a third:
What does she say she’ll do with the India deal? She wants to rip it up. The US deal that saves thousands upon thousands of jobs, what does she want to do? She wants to rip it up. The EU deal, good for our economy. She’s not even going to wait to see what it says.
It is so unserious. She was even reduced last week to calling the Indian government and accusing them of fake news, no wonder she did so badly as a trade secretary. The project for them is over, they’re sliding into oblivion, they’re a dead party walking.
It was not that Starmer was being contemptuous of Badenoch. It was more as if he no longer regards her as serious or important, and has given up trying to pretend otherwise.
Perhaps this is hubris. A wise politician never underestimates their opponent.
But perhaps Starmer is right after all, and perhaps Labour should be devoting all its intellectual energy to thinking about how to derail Farage. When Starmer says the Conservative party is finished, even someone like Jeremy Hunt won’t say for sure that he is wrong.
And there was nothing in Kemi Badenoch’s performance today that suggests she is about to overhaul Farage. In asking about the economy, she was on the right territory. But there was no nuance, subtlety or discrimination – just sweeping, “everything’s a disaster” declinism that sounded exaggerated, out of touch and a bit silly. Farage sounded more grounded – which is one of the reasons why his party is doing better than hers.
Liz Saville Roberts, the Plaid Cymru leader at Westminster, has issued this statement about the PM’s blunt response to her question at PMQs. (See 12.21pm.)
The prime minister’s outburst showed that my question struck a nerve. The expressions on the faces of many Labour MPs told their own story – plenty of them know I was right. If his convictions change with the political weather, it’s no surprise that support for Labour in Wales, as across Britain, is falling through the floor.
Nesil Caliskan (Lab) says the employment rights bill will deliver the biggest boost for workers’s rights in a generation. Does the PM agree that Reform UK voting against show they are not on the side of workers?
Starmer does agree.
He goes on:
Let us be clear what the parties opposite voted against.
Stronger statutory sick pay – they voted against.
The right to guaranteed hours – they voted against.
Protection from unfair dismissal – they voted against.
Stronger protection for pregnant mothers – they voted against.
Insecure work, a package worth £600 pounds to the poorest worker – they voted against.
Alison Griffiths (Con) asks why pensioners are not able to claim personal independence payment. She asks about a pensioner constituent left severly disabled after a dog attack.
Starmer says the current system does not work. It must be reformed.
Melanie Onn (Lab) says Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes is the clean energy capital of the UK. But Reform’s new mayor has declared war in renewables. Will the government proect these jobs?
Starmer says Onn is a champion of jobs. The parties opposite are “climate defeatists”. They should try explaining their policies to people dependent on these jobs, he says.
Starmer says opposition’s lack of support for net zero ‘further evidence Tory project finished’
John Lamont (Con) says people in his Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk constituency are “disgusted by the energy secretary’s obsessive pursuit of net zero at any cost”.
Starmer say there used to be a consensus on net zero. But the Tory attitude to it now is “further evidence, as far as I can see, that the Tory project is just finished”.
Andrew Snowden (Con) says the offshore cable scheme in Morecambe is one of the most objected to schemes in the country. He asks the government to consider another route.
Starmer says this is subject to a quasi-judicial planning process, so there is a limit to what he can say. But he says impacts are meant to be ‘“carefully considered” under the planning process.
Amanda Martin (Lab) asks if Starmer wil back her bill to increase penalties for people who steal tools from workers.
Starmer says this is a serious crime. The justice secretary will consider this, he says.
Farage says Starmer’s immigration speech shows he’s ‘learning great deal from us’
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, says he enjoyed Starmer’s speech on Monday. He says Starmer seems to be “learning a very great deal from us”.
He asks Starmer to declare a national emergency at the borders.
Starmer says the border security bill will give terrorism-type powers to the Border Force. But Farage voted against it.
UPDATE: Farage said:
We at Reform, a party that is alive and kicking, very much enjoyed your speech on Monday, you seem to be learning a very great deal from us. Could I encourage you please to go further, as a matter of national security?
Over the weekend, an illegal immigrant from Iran, who we believe came by boat, was arrested in the north of England on serious charges of terrorism. Since the speech on Monday, 1,000 young, undocumented young males have crossed the English Channel.
Does the prime minister agree, now is the time to declare the situation in the English Channel as a national security emergency?
And Starmer replied:
The situation is serious, the last government lost control of the borders.
The [border security, asylum and ammigration) bill is the first bill to give terrorism-like powers to law enforcement, precisely so that we can get in before the crimes are committed, before people get to this country.
This is the most far-reaching provision ever for law enforcement to defend and secure our borders, and that’s why it is extraordinary that he, of all people, voted against it.
Sarah Smith (Lab) asks about a boy waiting 18 months for an EHCP in her constituency. Will the voices of parents and children be at the heart of Send reforms?
Starmer says every young person with Send should get the right support. He says more funding has been allocated for this.
