Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he is "shocked" by the extent of the overcrowding crisis in the UK's prisons and that the situation is worse than he anticipated in the runup to the general election.
Starmer's comments to reporters covering his visit to the Nato summit in Washington DC come ahead of an expected announcement that some categories of prisoner will be automatically released after serving just 40% of their sentences.
The current so-called "standard determinate sentence" is 50%, meaning prisoners can be automatically released after serving half of their original sentence in situations where that original sentence was four years or fewer.
Last month, the Prison Governors Association warned whichever party was in government after the general election would need to act rapidly to protect the public as prisons reached maximum capacity – describing the system as "on the precipice of failure".
It said the "SDS40" early-release option was preferable to having nowhere to send even the most serious offenders to be incarcerated as this would put the public at greater risk.
Figures published by the Ministry of Justice on Friday said prison capacity was at 87,453 – around 1,400 short of usable capacity. This means that the nation's prisons are around 98.4% full.
In an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, former justice secretary Alex Chalk admitted that the Sunak administration had opted to kick the prisons crisis into the long grass because of the general election.
"You have to win votes," he said. "And that was the calculus that was taxing the prime minister and others."
Nevertheless, Chalk – who lost his ministerial post and his job as an MP last week – said he believed that SDS40 would be the right move for the Starmer administration to pursue, as new justice secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to announce tomorrow.
Yesterday, Starmer told reporters he had found details of the state of the nation's prisons to be more troubling than the state of the national coffers since becoming PM on Friday last week.
"Some of what we’ve found is shocking," he said. "The situation is worse than I thought it was. I’m pretty shocked that it’s been allowed to get into that situation."
Starmer said it had been "reckless" of the last government to allow prisons to get into this position.
"We’re going to have to set out the state of affairs [and] what we intend to do about it," he added.
In his Today programme podcast interview, Chalk cautioned successor Mahmood that SDS40 would only buy a maximum of 18 months' worth of prison space.
"You have to, as the new justice secretary, be very frank and credible about the long term," he said.
Chalk, whose government has flagged its prison-building efforts over the past decade – but which, as of last week, was not on track to deliver sufficient places to keep up with demand – said justifying spending on new prison places was a "tough question".
"The cost of keeping someone in prison is £49,000 a year. But the cost of building a new prison, each cell, the capital cost, is around £600,000," he said.
"If the situation is that you haven't got enough money, are you seriously saying that instead of building that hospital, we're going to be building a new nick at a cost of £600,000 per cell? I think that's a really tough question."
He added: "We have to work out as a nation how many people can we afford to lock up, and no-one's asking that question."
The Conservative Party's 2024 general election manifesto contained a commitment to build four new prisons, "completing our programme of 20,000 new prison places by 2030".
It added that "legacy EU rules" would be scrapped to make it easier to build prisons in "appropriate places".