Nigel Farage has called for Nightingale-style jails to help ease the UK’s prison overcrowding crisis. The Reform UK leader said the high-security buildings could be built within 18 months on Ministry of Defence land. Disused military barracks could also be converted to create more spaces, he said. And he vowed to deport the estimated 10,500 foreign criminals clogging up our jails.
Mr Farage unveiled his blueprint amid a row over Labour’s controversial plan for the early release of prisoners. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he will now “put a pause” on the plan after the family of police officer Andrew Harper criticised the fact that two of his killers were being considered for early release.
Reform UK's plan to tackle prison crisis
Writing exclusively in the Express, Mr Farage lambasted Labour’s plan as “a national disgrace” and vowed to scrap it completely if his party wins the next general election. Setting out Reform’s own plan, he said Reform will deport the 10,500 foreign criminals languishing in the country’s prisons. He says this will be made possible by quitting the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and scrapping Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act.
Mr Farage vowed to end the shortage of prison places by building “new Nightingale Prisons in 18 months.” “These low-cost, high-security, pre-fabricated prisons will be built on Ministry of Defence land. Disused military barracks could also be converted into jails. Those thousands more prison spaces will mean we can make sure that convicted criminals serve their sentences.”
Labour's early release scheme paused
Under the new Sentencing Act set to come into force in September, some 6,000 criminals – potentially including killers, rapists and paedophiles – were due to be released under the scheme. Mr Burnham said on Thursday: “Keeping the public safe will always be my top priority. I am working closely with the new Justice Secretary and have instructed my team to put a pause on the changes that were due to start in September. No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to minimise risk to the public. Where changes are needed, we will not hesitate to make them.”
Lissie Harper, the widow of PC Andrew Harper, described the scheme as “deplorable”.
Reform's justice adviser speaks out
Reform has enlisted the help of Vanessa Frake, a former prison governor, as a justice adviser. She said that the current crisis has been caused by “30 years of ignorance” by various governments. Ms Frake said the Government’s initial response to review the early release scheme – it has subsequently been paused – would cause “chaos”. “You have to understand that by now all of the sentencing plans, the sentencing release dates, will have been calculated for September,” she told Times Radio. “All of those prisoners will have been informed of their release dates. So it's going to be chaos, quite frankly. But you know, this is just another thing of this Government, this Labour Party. When the Sentencing Act was going through its passage, they were warned that it included violent offenders. They ignored amendments from opposition parties, which were designed to block rapists, child groomers, and sex offenders from the 50% rate, and the ruling government and the Labour MPs defeated that. They are the makers of their own downfall, really.”
Conservative and Labour reactions
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said she is not against the idea of Nightingale-style prisons but said “I am against rapists and murderers being let out”. Speaking at a press conference, she said: “We never did this early release scheme. We looked at the problem, and we found prison spaces elsewhere. We looked at other countries, we found ways to manage around it. But the bottom line is that we do need to build more prisons, that's going to need more money, and that means we need a bigger, stronger economy.”
But Labour appeared to knock down the idea of pop-up Nightingale-style prisons being built. A Labour source said: “Not sure what a pop-up prison is in the real world.”
Background on PC Harper case
PC Harper was 28 years old when he sustained fatal injuries while responding to a quad bike theft in Sulhamstead, Berkshire, in August 2019. The driver of the vehicle that caused PC Harper’s death, Henry Long, received a 16-year sentence and would not have been eligible for the scheme. But early release was on the cards for Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were passengers in the car and handed 13 years in custody for manslaughter after a trial at the Old Bailey in 2020. Both men could have become eligible for release from prison after serving half of their sentences, rather than two-thirds.
In March, courts were told to stop handing out short prison terms other than in a number of specific or exceptional circumstances. That means most offenders in England and Wales who would have faced up to a year in jail are now likely to receive no more than a suspended sentence.
The number of foreign nationals being held in jails in England and Wales rose by 3.1% from 10,418 in September 2024 to 10,737 a year later, according to Ministry of Justice figures. That was 15 times the rate of increase in the number of British people in jail, which rose by 0.2% to 76,334 over the same period.
