It’s not every day a politician owns their own party without realising it, but Tory MP Richard Holden has done just that. In his attempt to dig up dirt on Labour’s prison record, he’s accidentally revealed just how shockingly bad the Conservatives have been at increasing prison capacity.
455 new spaces in 14 years?!
Holden, the shadow paymaster general, asked a written parliamentary question to find out how many prison places had been created under Labour (1997–2010) and the Tories (2010–2024).
The response? Labour built 27,830 new prison places. The Conservatives? A grand total of… 455.
Yes, you read that right. 455 new spaces in 14 years—fewer than the current government has managed in just seven months. That’s got to sting.
Prison closures and overcrowding
Holden also asked how many cells the Tories had shut down during their time in office. The answer? More than 7,500.
To make matters worse, when he dug into Labour’s record further, he found that from 1997 to 2010, more than 9,000 prisoners ended up crammed into double-bunked cells, while overcrowded accommodation increased by around 7,000.
Holden seized on this as proof that Labour had failed, conveniently ignoring that his own party had built just 455 new places in 14 years—hardly the great reformers of the justice system.
Labour’s cheeky response
Labour didn’t let the irony of the situation slip past them. A party spokesperson mocked Holden’s failed “gotcha” moment, saying:
“It’s good to see Richard Holden play his part in exposing the Conservatives’ disastrous record on prisons.”
They added that his party “ran our prisons red-hot and took them to the brink of collapse” before cheekily thanking him for his “double-agent support” in highlighting the mess left behind.
Prisons on the brink of collapse
This all comes amid a damning Independent Sentencing Review, which found that successive governments’ obsession with looking “tough on crime” has pushed England and Wales’ justice system to breaking point.
Longer sentences have been used as a political tool rather than an actual solution to crime, and the result? An overcrowded, ineffective prison system that isn’t working.
Holden doubles down
Despite the brutal own goal, Holden wasn’t backing down. He accused Labour of dodging his questions and showing contempt for democracy, even threatening to take the issue to Parliamentary and Ministerial standards bodies.
Labour, meanwhile, seems quite happy to let him keep talking—after all, he’s doing a pretty good job of proving their point for them.
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