Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 25
Seventy-Eighth Report - Resettlement support for prison leavers
Published 11 Nov 2023
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Improving resettlement support for prison leavers All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
MoJ told us it has multiple options to increase prison capacity, including building new prisons and refurbishing the existing estate. MoJ told us it plans to increase prisoner capacity by 20,000 places at a cost of £3.8 billion, but it will need more funding after 2024–25 to bring its planned six new prisons ‘online’.63 It told us that since September 2022 HMPPS has brought online 2,500 of these new places though refurbishing the existing prison estate. In addition, MoJ told us it will be “very challenging” to build new prison capacity and increase the number of staff in the prison and probation service given current inflation, with less money in real terms.64
From: Public Accounts Committee, Seventy-Eighth Report - Resettlement support for prison leavers (HC 1329), 11 November 2023
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 14 February 2024 (deadline 11 January 2024).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government says it agrees with each of the Committee's recommendations on resettlement support for prison leavers, giving target dates for several of them.
- On inequalities, HMPPS is planning a programme of work to understand disparities in resettlement outcomes, and says that "By April 2025" it will deliver this analysis across prioritised thematic areas.
- On an action plan, HMPPS will "respond to the Committee by the six-month deadline" and says its plan will aim for "an adequate and consistent resettlement service" for all prison leavers by April 2025.
- On substance misuse, MoJ and the Department of Health and Social Care will develop a proposal on metrics, and the government says it will publish these metrics routinely, with a target implementation date of summer 2024.
- On evaluation, impact evaluations are "expected to be complete" by summer 2024, though findings on impact for some initiatives will only be available beyond 2024.