Facility under construction in Wrexham will not be run by private sector but will outsource around a third of its services
Britain’s first “supersized” Titan prison, which will hold more than 2,100 inmates, is to be run by the public prison service and not a private security company.
The prisons minister, Andrew Selous, told MPs on Tuesday that the new £212m facility being built in Wrexham, north Wales, will be operated by the prison service “as part of an innovative new approach”.
The approach does, however, include the outsourcing of a third of the prison’s services.
The announcement follows a plea from the chief inspector of prisons for lessons to be learned from the teething troubles at the last major jail to open, Oakwood prison near Wolverhampton, which holds 1,600 inmates and is run by G4S. An early inspection report described it as a prison where it was easier to get hold of illegal drugs than a bar of soap.
Construction of the new facility on the site of a former Firestone factory started in December. The first housing block is expected to open in two years’ time and the jail to be fully operational by September 2017.
Selous said the overall ownership and management of the prison would be in the public sector, but 34% of the services provided would be outsourced to private companies and voluntary organisations. This will include a large industrial complex of 12 workshops.
Since then a new generation of “supersized jails” that can accommodate 1,000-plus inmates has been developed, in some cases by building housing blocks within existing prison perimeters. The average capacity of new prisons built in England and Wales in the last century was about 600.
The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, said: “Given the mess David Cameron’s government made when they handed over the running of brand new Oakwood prison to G4S it’s no surprise they don’t want to repeat the same mistake. This was a jail where the chief inspector said was easier to get drugs than soap. We don’t want that disgraceful failure repeated elsewhere.”
Penal reformers observed that the decision to run the Wrexham jail, which has yet to be named, as a public sector prison may have been taken partly to appease the Welsh assembly. At least one assembly member, Aled Roberts, the Liberal Democrat member for North Wales, welcomed the decision on Monday.
