On 28 June 2021 the government announced plans to build a new 1,715-place prison in Market Harborough in Leicestershire, next to the existing Gartree lifers’ prison. This is the final proposed site for the £4bn New Prisons Programme, which in total will increase imprisonment capacity by 18,000, spread over six brand new gaols and eight extensions to existing ones.
The government has been aiming to boost prison numbers for several years now, exploiting fear of crime to popularise its plans. In 2020, as the prison building programme got underway in earnest, the government website boasted of the ‘£2.5bn programme to create 10,000 additional prison places [in] modern jails that boost rehabilitation and cut reoffending’.
The plans are additionally touted as being good for the economy: ‘Thousands of jobs will be created overall in the areas surrounding the prisons during construction and once they have opened. This will provide a major spur to local economies and support the construction industry to invest and innovate following the coronavirus pandemic.’
Following widespread local opposition to attempts to build new prisons in areas where there are not already any – such as that which led to the 2019 cancellation of a planned prison at Port Talbot in Wales – all six will be constructed either on the site of a demolished old prison, or next to one currently in operation. They will be a mixture of publicly and privately run.
Two of the six new prisons are already under construction. Five Wells is due to open in 2022 and is being built on the site of HMP Wellingborough, which closed in 2012 and was demolished in 2018, while a second new prison on the site of Glen Parva young offenders’ institute, which closed in 2017, is due to open in 2023. Between them they will have the capacity to house 3,360 prisoners. In September 2020 the government confirmed that the budget for Glen Parva’s had risen by £116m from the initial budget and it would now cost £286m.
Both these prisons will be privately operated, and a ten-year contract for Five Wells has already been given to G4S, despite its management of Birmingham prison being so bad that it was taken back into state hands in 2019. G4S currently runs Altcourse, Oakwood, Parc and Rye Hill prisons. It previously ran Tinsley House and Brook House Immigration Removal Centres but did not reapply for the contracts when they expired in 2019, following a series of high-profile revelations about the abuse of detainees.
The four prisons on which work is yet to start will be constructed by the companies ISG, Kier Group, Laing O’Rourke and Wates who have formed a consortium under the title Alliance 4 New Prisons. Kier Group is already building Five Wells.
A new prison next door to the existing high security Full Sutton prison in East Yorkshire with the capacity for 1,440 was granted general planning permission in 2019 but there is still a planning dispute around the re-routing of a ditch preventing building work from starting. The other planned prisons are in Chorley in Lancashire, next to the existing Garth and Wymott prisons, and in Buckinghamshire, next to the Grendon Therapeutic Community and Spring Hill open prisons.
In addition, the MOJ plans to expand capacity at HMPs Guys Marsh in Dorset, Rye Hill in Warwickshire and Stocken in England’s smallest county, Rutland, and to build additional workshops in which prisoners can provide cheap labour for external private employers at High Down in Surrey.
That all the prisons being built and all but one of those being expanded are Category C – the lowest security category for men held in closed prisons – is perhaps an indication that, despite its own hype, the government does not actually believe that there are a load of highly dangerous criminals out there who need locking up, but that it simply plans just to imprison yet more people whose main crime is being poor.
Nicki Jameson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 283, August/September 2021
