On Tuesday 5 August, Dame Anne Owers published the findings of her independent review into the handling of prison capacity. The review was commissioned in February 2025 by my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), to examine the decisions that led to the prison capacity crisis between 2022 and 2024, and to make recommendations to help future Governments avoid repeated crises. I am grateful to Dame Anne for her thorough and candid analysis, and I will ensure a copy of the review is deposited in the Libraries of both Houses.
This statement sets out the Government’s response, but first it is important to place this review in its proper context.
This Government inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse. Aside from a two-week period at the start of covid, the last time the total prison estate occupancy was under 95% was more than 12 years ago. At one point in 2024, there were fewer than 100 spaces in adult male prisons. If our prisons reach capacity, courts would be forced to suspend trials, and the police would be forced to stop making arrests. The consequences would be dire, and we would face a breakdown of law and order in this country.
The causes were clear—the last Government added just 500 net places to our prison estate in 14 years, while at the same time sentence lengths rose.
That is why this Government have acted decisively. We have committed to the largest expansion of the estate since the Victorians, committing £7 billion to building prison places between 2024-25 and 2029-30. We are delivering 14,000 new prison places, including four new prisons, and are on track to do so by 2031. We have already opened HMP Millsike, a 1,500-place prison, in March 2025, and broke ground on HMP Welland Oaks, a new 1,700-place prison in November 2025. We have delivered around 2,900 new places since taking office.
We have also recently introduced the Sentencing Bill to Parliament in order to implement many of the recommendations in the sentencing review as soon as possible and put prisons on a more sustainable footing.
We need to lift the prison system out of crisis and start improving it, raising standards to keep the public safe while tackling reoffending. Our actions will increase capacity and are the turning point for us to improve prisons’ performance.
We welcome the review’s findings, which shine a light on the flawed decision-making structures and missed opportunities. We acknowledge the need to address prison capacity within the context of wider criminal justice reform and have accepted in principle the majority of Dame Anne Owers’ recommendations. Work is already under way to address these.
For instance, we are increasing investment in probation services by up to £700 million by the final year of the spending review period. This enhanced funding will allow us to tag and monitor tens of thousands more offenders, enabling close supervision in the community and reducing pressure on the prison estate. Alongside this, we are deepening our collaboration with the third sector—through the Our Future Probation Service stakeholder engagement forum and other established channels—to ensure that community services are designed and delivered in ways that reflect frontline expertise and meet the needs of those we support.
We are also committed to improving transparency across the criminal justice system. In December 2024, the Ministry of Justice published the first annual statement on prison capacity, which set out population projections, supply plans and information on probation capacity.
These steps, alongside other planned and ongoing activity, reflect our commitment to building a more resilient, transparent and forward-looking criminal justice system. Dame Anne’s review will help inform our strategic approach to prison capacity and ensure the mistakes of the past are never repeated and that prison places are always available for those who pose a risk to public safety.
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