Deals

UK scraps Titan and opens bidding for private prisons

Britain’s justice minister has confirmed he is scrapping plans for three giant new prisons in favour of five smaller, and probably privately-funded, jails. Critics have slammed large-capacity prisons as more expensive with higher re-offending rates.

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The UK’s Justice Secretary Jack Straw has confirmed he is scrapping plans for three 2,500-place “Titan” prisons and replacing them with five 1,500-place prisons which may be financed privately.

“Public, private and third sector providers will be invited to bid,” Straw told Parliament yesterday.

Jack Straw

Plans are already underway for the first two prisons in Beam Park West in London and Runwell in Essex. Meanwhile “poorly performing” prisons in Birmingham and Wellingborough will also be up for auction for redevelopment, Straw said.

“These new prisons will be neither Victorian replicas nor large warehouses,” he said.

A new government will be looking for better run, new build prisons, within which the private sector will be much more welcome.

Jonathan Aitken

The decision to scrap Titan, which would have cost £1.3 billion (€ 1.4 billion; $1.9 billion) was partly attributed to opposition from policy makers who said that larger prisons are more expensive to manage and have higher reoffending rates. Dame Anne Owers, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, was among those who opposed Titan.

“The cancellation of the Titan programme opens the door to many new ways of solving the prison over-crowding crisis. It is likely that a much more popular option will be to go down the route of academy prisons [privately-sponsored state jails],” said Jonathan Aitken, the former-Conservative minister and chairman of Tory think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, which last month published a damning report on Titan.

“My opinion is that a new government will be looking for better run, new build prisons, within which the private sector will be much more welcome,” Aitken added.