Ministers weigh prison security upgrades to tackle UK overcrowding crisis

Ministers are examining a possible upgrade of security at men’s category C and women’s prisons to deal with an overcrowding crisis across the England and Wales estate, the Guardian understands.

Officials have explored diverting prisoners on remand or serving short sentences away from category B “reception” prisons such as HMPs Liverpool, Manchester and Pentonville in north London.

Instead, they are assessing the feasibility of holding male prisoners in alternative sites, such as men’s training prisons or repurposed and emptied women’s jails, once security has been improved.

Andy Burnham asked the justice secretary, Alex Norris, this week to deliver a plan to free up more space in overcrowded jails. It follows intense pressure on the new government over how to block the early release of PC Andrew Harper’s killers.

Ministers have been advised that they can only move prisoners from category B to category C or women’s prisons if security is improved.

There are 30 men’s reception prisons across England and Wales. Also known as local prisons, they tend to be Victorian and severely overcrowded, holding remand and short-term prisoners.

They tend to have high walls and fences, often topped with razor wire, bars on windows, CCTV and controlled access and internal partitions.

Remand prisoners comprise approximately one-fifth of the total prison population in England and Wales, a proportion that has risen steeply in recent years because of court backlogs.

X-ray body scanners are deployed across category B local prisons and are used on many prisoners entering the estate to detect internal concealment of contraband including drugs, phones and weapons.

About half of England and Wales’s 86,000 prisoners are held in category C prisons, which specialise in preparing offenders for work and resettlement.

Prisoners in category C jails are assessed as a low to moderate security risk and are held in “closed” conditions but do not face high security such as razor wire and internal partitions. They tend to face fewer body scans and searches.

For more than a year, Ministry of Justice officials have been seriously examining schemes to divert female offenders out of jail.

But experts have pointed out that converting a women’s prison so that it could hold more men should also include a major security upgrade.

Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the prison officers union, the POA, said converting the security of category C or women’s prisons will take too long to ease the crisis currently facing the Prison Service.

“The category C estate is currently tight for space due to delays in transferring suitable prisoners from closed to open conditions,” he said.

“We need to consider reducing the remand population so we are not consistently struggling for cell space.

“Upgrading security in any prison is a long drawn-out process and will take time that we do not have.”

Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “Many of the problems now facing category C prisons are also facing category B prisons – they are also overcrowded and are not rehabilitating those held there.

“I would be concerned that this plan, if implemented, could just further erode the difference between the categories. Is the government just accepting that there is no room for rehabilitation in prisons that were designed to offer it to people held there? If so, this is a counsel of despair.”

Burnham ordered Norris to draw up plans to free up prison space for serious offenders, and said he is “increasingly confident” that PC Harper’s killers will not be released early from their sentences as a result.

The prime minister was asked on Tuesday if he had a message for Aimee Harper, the sister of the police officer who died in the line of duty in 2019, and who had shared with the broadcaster LBC her experience of sitting in the courtroom with his killers.

Asked what he would say to Harper, Burnham replied: “That I hear you, I feel for you. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t do everything I possibly could to try and lessen your anguish, and I am doing that.

“I am turning over every stone. I am looking at everything. I am pushing the system to go further.”

He added: “That’s the way I go about my job. I listen to people. I continually push myself and the system to do more. In this instance, I think there is more that can be done.”

In a further development, the Estonian government has rejected a plan supported by the Conservatives and Reform UK of taking prisoners from the UK to help ease the overcrowding crisis.

Justice minister Liisa Pakosta told the BBC that Estonia would not rent jail cells to other countries while it was housing criminals from Sweden in its half-empty Tartu prison under a bilateral deal.

The Tories and Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, have both suggested renting cells in foreign prisons, including in Estonia, to free up space and prevent the early releases of some offenders in England and Wales.

Keir Starmer’s government also explored the idea in 2024 but talks with Estonia came to nothing.