Some of the most significant exchanges in parliament happen not in the House of Commons or House of Lords chambers, but on the Committee Room corridor.
Take, for instance, last Monday, when the Public Accounts Committee heard from some of the most senior civil servants in the Ministry of Justice. They included the Ministry’s top civil servant, Permanent Secretary, Dame Antonia Romeo, and Amy Rees, the Director General of the Prison Service.
The Committee is conducting an Inquiry into the Government’s plans to build more prison capacity. As the Chair of the Committee, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, explained in his opening remarks, things have not been going well:
In 2021, the Government committed to build 20,000 new prison places... this is not expected to be delivered until 2031, five years later than planned, and at an increased cost of £4.2 billion. In response to extreme pressure on available prison spaces, the Government have enacted emergency measures, taking a reactive and costly approach to try to urgently increase capacity.
One of the most striking exchanges, for me, came over what might appear to be a rather dull matter: prison maintenance budgets. The Prison Service has £220 million to spend in this financial year and £300 million next year on prison maintenance.
Is “£200 million a year on maintenance... enough?”, Sir Geoffrey asked Dame Antonia. She was refreshingly candid in her response:
It is not enough. As HMPPS has revealed, we need £2.8 billion to totally remediate. In the current SR, we were given, specifically, £220 million and £300 million. We can all do the maths. We are going to need a lot more money in the next spending round to begin to make inroads into the maintenance.
One problem here – something that a number of MPs and Peers have been raising over recent months – is the outsourcing of prison maintenance to private contractors. It is widely seen to have delivered a poor service at an inflated cost.
Were prison maintenance to be brought in-house, the argument goes, the current maintenance budget would go a lot further. I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. I also wonder whether there are more fundamental issues at stake.
When it comes to prisons, governments have, over many years, been living beyond their means. The result is miserable, decaying buildings, impoverished regimes, too many prisoners and not enough staff. New, expensive capacity only compounds the problem: pushing up the running and maintenance costs of the prison estate over time.
Politicians across the political spectrum do the easy work: talking tough and passing legislation pumping up demand for more prison capacity. But they fail to do the difficult work: thinking about what an appropriate level of imprisonment is, how the prison estate should be organised, and how it should be paid for.
Back in 2019, the House of Commons Justice Committee estimated that, were the government to close the gap between the money available to prisons, and the actual costs of running and maintaining them, the prison population would have to be reduced by some 20,000.
This is, perhaps, one of the few areas in public policy where shrinking the service in line with the available budget, rather than increasing the budget to meet politician-driven demand, might serve a progressive function. As a start, the Ministry of Justice should cancel its plans to build new prisons and redirect the budget towards bringing the current prison estate up to scratch.
I hope that the Public Accounts Committee makes some strong recommendations about how the government might live within its means.
I also hope that ministers and MPs are paying attention.
