London prison capacity has dropped by more than 12% since 2015, despite increasing demand for space, new data has revealed.
According to Government figures, ‘operational capacity’ fell from 8,950 places in October 2015 to 7,851 in October 2025, amidst pressures to increase prison places.
Last year, the Ministry of Justice had to review plans to create 20,000 new prison places by the mid-2020s, having only succeeded in delivering 6,518 of these places, 278 of which were created by overcrowding four private prisons around the country.
The Government department now intends to deliver 14,000 new places by 2031.
Across the UK as a whole, capacity increased by just 0.86% in the past decade, with prisons now operating at 96%. So why are the capital’s prison spaces falling away?
Between 2015 and 2025, London prisons lost 553 places to maintenance issues, with roughly 2,000 beds consistently out of use across the UK, a problem which is exacerbated by overcrowding.
Visiting Professor to the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford, and an Inspection Team Leader at HM Inspectorate of Prisons, Dr Hindpal Singh Bhui said: “The prison system is under such pressure the whole time that it’s very difficult to take cells which are deteriorating out of use.
“London prisons in particular are under tremendous pressure. They are amongst the oldest in the estate, many of them.
“You walk into Pentonville, and it still looks, in some parts, exactly like it would have done 200 years ago. So, there’s a lot of work to be done to upgrade those sorts of prisons.”
The prison maintenance backlog is an ongoing issue, partly due to funding constraints.
According to a report published by parliament in March, ensuring “fair” conditions across the UK prison estate would cost an estimated £2.8bn and would also require headroom in capacity to facilitate the maintenance work.
But the Ministry of Justice received a budget of just £520m in maintenance funding over the next two years.
Closures are increasing across London, with a wing at Wandsworth out of action, and several units (of roughly 170 beds in total) closed at HMP & YOI Feltham.
As damage is left unchecked, capacity shrinks, whether that be from essential maintenance work or irreparable damage, and inmates are shipped further afield.
For women, the only prison in London – one of the largest female-only prisons in Western Europe – closed in 2016. Female prisoners are now held, on average, 64 miles from their homes.
Former HMP Wandsworth inmate and now prisons journalist, David Shipley said: “I don’t think there’s any space to do anything other than just tactically move people around at the moment to desperately try to avoid running out of jail cells.
“But actually, we know that family contact and community links are really effective mechanisms for driving down reoffending.
“There are lots of actual good reasons that we’ve generally jailed people near where they’re from, near where they live, and we are walking away from that, not because of any good reason, but simply because we are in crisis.”
Demand for prison places in the UK is expected to outstrip supply by 9,500 places by 2028; a figure the new Government Sentencing Bill hopes to address.
The Bill, which was launched in September, aims to make changes to sentencing law and the law governing the management of offenders.
Those changes include suspending all sentences of 12 months or less, suspending sentences of up to three years (rather than two), and introducing ‘earned progression’ to prison sentences, allowing most offenders to be released after a third of their sentence unless they break prison rules.
Dr Singh Bhui said: “You’ve got a situation where, in the last 40-odd years, prison populations have roughly doubled. At the same time, the sentence lengths have roughly doubled as well.
“The sentencing bill, I think, is one step in the right direction, and hopefully, it will lead to slightly more radical thinking about how we can get a grip on the prison population.”
The MOJ has said that the Bill, which will be reviewed in the House of Lords for the Report Stage in January, “aims to ensure that prisons never run out of space again and delivers punishment that effectively reduces crime”.
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