Justice Secretary appears to rule out closure of Wandsworth Prison
Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has refused to say if Wandsworth Prison will be closed following the escape of Daniel Khalife
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Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has refused to say if Wandsworth Prison will be closed following the escape of Daniel Khalife.
He was asked about the future of the prison following the escape and comments from the chief inspector of prisons who said it should be closed ideally due to poor conditions.
Chalk told GB News: “We've taken 40 [prisoners] out to move elsewhere, just as we get to the bottom of what happened. Now that is a sensible, interim, precautionary step.
“And I just also want to make the point about Wandsworth, there have been issues with crowding which I accept which goes back for not just five years, it’s 25 or 30 years, but the difference is we are doing something about it.
“Very significant investment is going into prisons, two already built, one currently under construction and these are big jails.”
In an interview with Camilla Tominey, he said: “…the investment that is going in now and has gone on over recent years, incidentally, authorised by this Prime Minister as Chancellor is the biggest programme of investment since the Victorian era.
“So it's not just new prisons, important though they are, it's refurbishing blocks in HMP Liverpool, in HMP Birmingham…it's about rapid deployments.
“So vast investment is going in, and this is the important point, not in response to Khalife incident, but this has been going on for very many years and is really starting to make a difference.”
Asked about the perception that police are soft on some types of crime, he said: “There are more police officers than at any time in our history.
“Also, we're recruiting more judges, increasing the amount of Legal Aid investment and so on.
"So we're doing everything we can to ensure that victims get justice.”
He also admitted that the backlog of crown court cases is now as big as it was before the Covid pandemic.
Chalk said: “it was very, very badly affected by Covid, which is why we're working our way through, we put [in] huge resources.
“That's to say we've got Nightingale courts, which are still open, 1,000 additional judges, to £141 million pounds more towards Legal Aid.
"So we are working through it. We're putting downward pressure on that."