Countries should lose out on foreign aid and visa deals if they refuse to take back criminals held in English and Welsh prisons, Robert Jenrick has declared.
The Shadow Justice Secretary said deporting 10,500 foreign national offenders is the “number one thing we can do to free-up prison capacity”.
If countries refuse, they should be denied foreign aid and their citizens visa rights, Mr Jenrick said.
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said: “That is the number one thing we can do to free-up prison capacity. And how do you do that? Use every lever of the British state to put pressure on those other countries to take back their own criminals,” Mr Jenrick told Sky News.
He added: “Do things like stopping issuing visas, don’t give foreign aid to those countries. If they won’t take back their criminals, we shouldn’t be supporting them.
“Those are the sorts of things I would be doing as Justice Secretary but I would suggest that Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood for ideological reasons are happy to release these people in a way that I certainly never would be.”
Around 12 per cent – 10,500 – of those in prison are foreign nationals. Around 4,330 FNOs were deported in the year to June 2024.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has promised to find a total of 14,000 cell spaces in jails by 2031.
Some 6,400 of these will be at newly built prisons, with £2.3 billion towards the cost over the next two years.
Ms Mahmood also suggested councils could be overruled to push through the construction plans in a bid to grip the overcrowding crisis, and hinted jury trials could be scrapped in some instances to cut the backlog of court cases.
The remaining places will be found by measures including building new wings at existing jails, or by refurbishing cells currently out of action, and an extra £500 million will go towards “vital building maintenance”, the department said on Wednesday.
But the Justice Secretary admitted the justice system could still run out of prison places.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We will run out because even all of that new supply, with the increase in prison population that we will see as a result of that new supply, doesn’t help you with the rise in demand, because demand is still rising faster than any supply could catch up with.”
Stressing that “building alone” will not be enough to deal with the overcrowding crisis, Ms Mahmood also confirmed “we will have to expand the range of punishment outside of prison”, adding: “That does mean that we will have more offenders monitored outside.”
Prisons will be deemed sites of “national importance” amid efforts to prevent lengthy planning delays, with Ms Mahmood saying decisions on new prison building will be made by Deputy Prime Minster Angela Rayner, who is the Housing Secretary.
Asked whether the Government would “fast-track applications and overrule the objections of local people and local councils”, Ms Mahmood told BBC Breakfast: “Yes, so our manifesto commitment was that we consider prisons to be of national importance.
“These are critical infrastructure projects, they are absolutely necessary to make sure the country doesn’t run out of prison places.”
Asked about concerns people may have about a prison being built near their homes, she said: “We have to be honest about the fact that prison building is required.”
Elsewhere, the Justice Secretary hinted at the prospect of jury trials being abandoned in some cases to tackle backlogs in the system.
She told LBC an announcement would be made “imminently” in the Commons and to the media on the issue.
“We do have a crown court backlog that is very high and likely to rise because the sheer number of cases that are coming into the system is so big, that even if we were sitting at maximum capacity across the whole of the crown court, we still wouldn’t be able to touch the sides of that backlog,” she said.
“That does say that we need to think about doing things differently and the announcements that we will be making will set out the Government’s proposals in this space.”
Ms Mahmood added: “I do believe that justice delayed is justice denied. So, we are going to have to think about a different way of managing our crown courts so that we can crack down on that backlog properly.”
Her comments come a day after Home Office minister Dame Angela Eagle described suggestions about resorting to scrapping some jury trials as “one quite extreme way of looking at it”, telling Sky News “Dispensing with jury trials is one difficult end of some of the decisions that might have to be made.”
The Government’s 10-year prisons plan is aimed at making sure “we can always lock up dangerous criminals”, the MoJ said.
The announcement comes after government estimates published last week indicated more than 100,000 prisoners could be held in jails in England and Wales by 2029.
This followed warnings from Whitehall’s spending watchdog that Government plans to boost prison capacity could fall short by thousands of cell spaces within two years, and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds more than anticipated.
Since September thousands of inmates have been freed early in a bid to cut jail overcrowding, by temporarily reducing the proportion of sentences which some prisoners must serve behind bars in England and Wales from 50% to 40%.
But prisons are still expected to reach critical capacity again by July.
MoJ figures show there were 86,089 adult prisoners behind bars in England and Wales on Monday.
The so-called operational capacity for English and Welsh men’s and women’s prisons is 88,822, indicating there is now cell space for 2,733 criminals.
Asked if she could guarantee there would be no more emergency releases over the next five years, Ms Mahmood told Sky News: “I’m not going to do any more emergency releases of the kind either that I’ve had to do at the beginning or as the last Conservative government did with their early release scheme as well.
“I want to avoid that scenario. We will not be doing that. There are other operational measures that we might have to take to try and stabilise the prison system… so more people potentially on home detention curfew.”
