Two leading penal reform charities have raised serious doubts about the Justice Secretary’s changes to the Sentencing Act 2026.
Andrea Coomber, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the hunt for prison places had grown desperate. She said it now extended to office space, laundry rooms and storage areas.
She called the situation a chaotic way to run a country. She blamed decades of successive governments lengthening prison sentences without considering the consequences. The jails that already exist do not have enough staff, she added.
Ms Coomber recalled a statement to the Commons in 2024 by Shabana Mahmood, then Lord Chancellor and now Home Secretary. Ms Mahmood had said the country could not build its way out of the crisis. Two years on, Ms Coomber said, Andy Burnham’s new Government appeared to be attempting exactly that.
She urged ministers to invest in communities, probation, education, mental health and drug support, and in the economy.
‘Warehousing of prisoners’
Pia Sinha, Chief Executive of the Prison Reform Trust, said the Government recognised the strain on prisons. But she said it was once again treating the symptom rather than the cause.
She said the plan to turn offices and unused space into cells sent a clear signal. In her view, the Government was trading rehabilitation for the warehousing of prisoners. People could leave prison with their resettlement needs unmet, she warned. They could return to custody on recall, and the public could remain unsafe.
Ms Sinha said extra places alone would not make the justice system safer or more effective. She called for action to cut unnecessary imprisonment, improve community alternatives and tackle the drivers of reoffending. Without it, new places would fill as fast as the Government built them.
She said decades of penal expansion had left prisons overcrowded and staff stretched. Prisoners often had severely limited access to education, healthcare and rehabilitation.
IPP review welcomed
The Government also announced a review of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences in Parliament on the same day. Ms Sinha welcomed the review and the commitment to legislate in this parliament to end the sentence.
She also welcomed plans to pursue reform on a cross-party basis. Robert Buckland and Lord Blunkett will help oversee the proposals. She said IPP prisoners and their families had often seen their hopes raised and then dashed, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Shirley DeBono of the IPP Committee in Action said the group would keep campaigning until the Government abolished the sentence and fixed release dates. She said a habeas corpus action for four named individuals would go to a hearing in October this year. It is a test case.
