Part of Justice – in the House of Commons at on 19 May 2026.
Jake Richards
Assistant Whip, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice
This Government are undertaking the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era. We will be building 13,000 new places by 2031. We inherited a prison capacity crisis from the Conservatives, so it takes some chutzpah for them to start asking questions about prison building. We are committed to the prison building programme that we announced in 2024, and we are confident that we will match it. We are fixing the mess that they created.
The Conservatives are a centre-right political party in the UK, founded in the 1830s. They are also known as the Tory party.
With a lower-case ‘c’, ‘conservative’ is an adjective which implies a dislike of change, and a preference for traditional values.