The justice secretary, Michael Gove, has scrapped plans for a giant £100m “secure college” for teenage prisoners, in a U-turn that will be embarrassing for his predecessor Chris Grayling.
The government had already awarded a contract to build the prison to hold 320 young people, spent almost £6m on preparations and passed enabling legislation at the end of the last parliament. However, Gove has decided not to proceed with the project on grounds of cost and practicality.
Labour and charities welcomed the news, having described it as a giant “modern-day borstal”, but said plans for the Leicestershire prison should never have got off the drawing board.
Lord Falconer, the shadow justice secretary, said it was a “victory for common sense” and called on the government to start improving conditions in the existing prison estate rather than wasting more taxpayer cash on a “vanity project”.
Gove’s decision to scrap the plans are the first big U-turn of the new government. The prison plan was announced with great fanfare by Grayling and the Lib Dem former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in 2014.
The Guardian revealed last month that Gove was wavering about the plans, as departments faced pressure to make deep spending cuts.
The prisons minister Andrew Selous confirmed the retreat in answer to a parliamentary question, blaming the original policy on the “coalition government”.
“The nature of the challenge has changed,” Selous said. “The youth custody population has fallen from 1,349 in January 2013 to 999 in April 2015, a fall of 26%. A secure college could have been desirable with a larger population, but it would not be right to house one-third of the entire youth offender population in one setting.
“It would also be a mistake to press ahead with such a development when resources are so tight. We are therefore not going ahead with the creation of a secure college pathfinder. All work on the proposed secure college pathfinder at Glen Parva has now ceased.”
Children’s charities had criticised the plan. A coalition of 29 organisations wrote to the Telegraph last October saying the project amounted to a borstal and was dangerous.
The Howard League for Penal Reform said the plans to build a “super-sized child prison” had always been misguided.
