Kemi Badenoch has vowed to build 50,000 extra prison spaces by cutting the foreign aid budget down to £1 billion annually in an effort to bring an end to the early release of offenders, reports BritPanorama.
The Conservatives stated that most of the new places would be created within a single parliament, with the full quota achieved inside seven years. Throughout the 14 years the party spent in government, a net figure of roughly 500 places was added, factoring in 14,142 spaces built in new and existing institutions against 13,660 lost chiefly through closures and deterioration.
Mrs Badenoch accepted that the capacity delivered by the previous Conservative government was “nowhere near enough.” She added: “We now have a plan to solve this issue and build 50,000 new prison places, the biggest prison increase since Queen Victoria, instead of papering over the cracks, investing £2 billion a year in our prisons and reversing Labour’s dangerous early-release schemes.”
“The first duty of government is to keep law-abiding people safe. Full prisons are a reason to build more cells, not release more criminals onto our streets,” she stated. Labour chairwoman Bridget Phillipson responded by saying the Conservatives were “taking the public for fools” after their record in power. “Now Kemi Badenoch expects the British people to believe they’ll build 50,000. These proposals are just not credible from a party who left our criminal justice system at breaking point,” she said.
To fund the prison places, international development spending would be slashed to £1 billion a year, down from a previous Tory pledge to reduce it from 0.3% of gross national income to 0.1%. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport budget would also be cut by £1 billion, and spending on Cabinet Office communications reduced by £0.5 billion under the plans. The UK’s overseas aid has already been reduced significantly.
The effective cut was at least £1.2 billion, according to an estimate from Bond, the UK network for development organisations. In a bid to ease overcrowding, the former Tory government began releasing some offenders before the end of their sentences in 2023, a practice the current Labour administration has continued amid ongoing capacity pressures.
Following Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s decision to exempt prisoners guilty of manslaughter, grooming offences, and causing or allowing the death of a child from the current programme, the number due to be freed early over the next year has been cut from around 6,000 to around 5,000. More than 70,000 prisoners have been let out of jail since 2024 under the Labour Government’s scheme, with over 10,000 freed up to 70 days early under the last Conservative administration, according to Ministry of Justice figures.
Under the current process, offenders serving fixed-term sentences will serve a third of their time behind bars before being released, rather than half. Opposition leader Mrs Badenoch said the Government was still letting “dangerous offenders” out early and accused Labour of “papering over the cracks” after entering office without a plan to fix the problem.
Echoing former Conservative home secretary Michael Howard’s mantra that “prison works,” she remarked, “A violent criminal doesn’t become less dangerous just because the Government has run out of prison cells. Labour cancelled our plans to rent spaces abroad, and now they are stuck. Their answer is to let dangerous offenders out even earlier instead of building the prison spaces we need.”
“If someone keeps burgling homes, assaulting people, stealing, or offending again and again, they should have to face the consequences for doing so in prison,” Mrs Badenoch continued. Shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy added that jail time works by “punishing and deterring, but most importantly by incapacitating,” insisting that prison “should keep violent and repeat offenders away from the law-abiding public.”
“Right now, we do not have the prison space to incarcerate those who commit serious crime or are repeat offenders,” he said. “Labour have presided over an early release crisis that has seen thousands of victims told that the perpetrators of the crimes against them will be let out of prison early.”
Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf criticized the Conservatives, stating, “Over 14 years in government, the Conservatives – with Kemi sat round the cabinet table – built just 400 prison places to cope with the five million people they imported into the country. The suggestion that they will now magically build 125 times more prison places than they managed while in office is pure fantasy.”
The political and social implications of these proposals raise significant questions about the UK’s approach to justice and rehabilitation, further complicating the already fraught dialogue surrounding crime and punishment in the country.
