Kemi Badenoch has urged members of the public to support prison-building in their area amid a row over Labour’s plan to release some criminals early.
Just days after Mr Burnham announced plans to pause the early release scheme, Mrs Badenoch appealed to the public, saying: “If everybody says ‘no prison near me’, we won’t get these built”.
The Conservative Party leader also said he should go further than simply pausing the plans, instead calling for him to change the law.
Under changes in the Sentencing Act, some 6,000 offenders were set to be let out of prison in September after serving a third of their sentence – rather than half – in a bid to ease prison overcrowding.
Giving a press conference on Tuesday, the Conservative Party leader said: “We do need to build new prison places more quickly and cheaply. This will cost money but it also needs communities to be supportive of prisons being built around them.
“One of the things that did cause delays was judicial reviews of prisons not being built.
“If everybody says ‘no prison near me’, we won’t get these built, so this is something that the public can help with – let us build prisons to put these people in. We cannot say ‘no’ to every potential site for a prison.”
She also called for the Labour government to rent prison places overseas and to remove foreign offenders to their home countries.
“The second thing that we can do a little bit earlier is rent prison places overseas. This was something which we were doing in government, we had plans to rent prison places just like Sweden has done with Estonia so that we didn’t have to just release these sorts of violent criminals early”, Mrs Badenoch said.
Calling for the government to “remove foreign offenders to prisons in their home countries”, she said the UK must “leave the (European) Convention on Human Rights”, which she described as a blocker on removals.
Claiming Mr Burnham “hasn’t done anything at all to pause” the early release programme, Mrs Badenoch said: “If Andy Burnham wants to prove that he is serious about this, he needs to revoke the commencement order… That would show that he is really pausing it. And then he needs to bring in emergency legislation by September 2.”
Mr Burnham said he would do “anything I can to minimise the risk to the public” but blamed the Tories for failing to build enough prison places to prevent overcrowding.
The prime minister told reporters: “It is a challenging situation, and we shouldn’t actually be in this position as a country. But we have to deal with the reality of where we are.”
He added: “The pause is real and it was one of the first things I did coming into office last week, so the September releases is on hold.
“And then secondly, the review that I have instigated is also a real process and we are taking a very serious look at the situation.
“Of course, this goes back a number of years when the previous government failed to put in place the prison places needed.”
Reforms in the Sentencing Act came after prisons came close to running out of space entirely last year, risking the “total breakdown of law and order”, which would leave police unable to make arrests and courts unable to send offenders to custody, the then justice secretary Shabana Mahmood said.
Mrs Badenoch admitted that “the situation with prisons is challenging” but said her party “never had killers, rapists, paedophiles on early release”.
“When we were in government, we saw the challenge. We created 14,000 prison new prison places, it was nowhere near enough”, she said.
“We had a prison-building target in our manifesto. Covid derailed that programme. We’d sold some prisons to get the money to build new ones but the programme, as I said, was derailed.”
Last week, Mr Burnhamvowed that “no prisoners will be let out under this policy” pending an “urgent review” following a row over the policy which broke out after it was revealed that two of those responsible for the death of PC Harper could be eligible for automatic release under the scheme.
The police officer was 28 when he sustained fatal injuries after getting his feet caught in a strap attached to the back of a car and dragged for a mile as three teenage suspects fled the scene of a burglary in Berkshire in 2019.
Lissie Harper, PC Harper’s widow, described the scheme as “deplorable” on Wednesday and accused politicians of “making decisions from behind a desk that will have real and lasting consequences” for the families of victims.
