The Ministry of Justice is spending an average of £7.2 million per prison on heat pumps, solar panels, and heating upgrades. Anyone want to focus on building actual cells?
The costs came in a parliamentary answer to Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy, who asked about the Accelerated Houseblocks Delivery Programme – the scheme to add new wings to six existing jails. New barless windows contribute a further £1.7 million per project. Got to keep it homely…
The MoJ estimates each new prison place costs £600,000. So each project’s heating, solar bill, and nice window project costs the same as 15 new places. Across six jails that comes to over £53.4 million – enough for 89 additional places. Every little helps…
At the new HMP Welland Oaks planners demanded 29.4 hectares of ‘biodiversity net gain’, which is more than two and a half times the 10% legal minimum. Cells get underfloor heating and the rest of the prison gets 460 barless windows…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”