Prison population to surge well beyond capacity despite Labour bid to ease burden

This means that an additional 14,250 spaces will be required within five years in order to accommodate the expected number of inmates, as per the forecast. This would leave zero headroom.

The worrying figures come despite Labour's pledge at the General Election to reduce the burden on the prison system.

During his election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer vowed to deliver an additional 20,000 places that had previously been promised by the Tories. At the time of the election, just 5,900 of these were operational.

Sir Keir also said it would be placed as being of "national importance".

Since June 2024, the headroom in prisons has increased from 1,579 to 2,287.

In the same time frame, the total usable operational capacity of the UK's prisons has also marginally increased from 88,863 to 89,350.

With the problem being cited as of "national importance", Labour set out an early release scheme in order to ease the pressure on the system.

It saw inmates being released when just 40 per cent of their sentence had been served, in comparison to the usual 50 per cent.

Between September 2024 and June 2025, 38,042 prisoners were freed under the scheme, according to MoJ figures.

The scheme was introduced as headroom reached almost breaking point - just 100 spaces remained across the UK.

Then-Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said at the time: "In short, if we fail to act now, we face the collapse of the criminal justice system and a total breakdown of law and order".

But this scheme brought its own problems - errors in releases.

Current Justice Secretary David Lammy faces a new crisis of wrongful releases, with 262 cases in the year to March 2025, up from 87 the year prior.

The Deputy Prime Minister has cited an archaic, paper-based practice of keeping track of prisoners as partly to blame.

"Boxes of paperwork” are responsible for the disorganisation of the prison system, which appears to be stuck in the pre-computer era.

A lack of a central database and digital infrastructure that is frankly far behind current times means basic errors can, and have, too easily crept in.

Prisons Minister Lord Timpson has also suggested errors were a result of prison officers making manual calculations as to how long an offender has left of their sentence.

This is made complicated when prisoners have multiple offences, and even more so by the Government’s early release scheme.

Mr Lammy told the BBC there would always be "human error" while prisons were using the paper-based system, insisting the situation would improve once a "completely digital system" was introduced.

He admitted there had been "a spike" in accidental releases, but said it was now on "a downward trajectory".

The number of prisoners who have been let out in error rose by 128 per cent last year.

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