Evaluation of the New Prisons Programme in England and Wales

What is the issue?

Prisons in England and Wales have been subject to growing pressure over the last decades, with increasing numbers of people in prison. Combined with challenges around recruiting and retaining staff and a dilapidated estate, these pressures lead to prisoners facing limited regimes and overcrowding, with limited opportunity to access support for rehabilitation.

The UK government aims to address this challenge by providing more prison places that are clean, decent and modern. This includes a commitment to open new prisons across England (known as the New Prisons Programme). First announced in the 2021 Prisons Strategy White Paper, the first two new prisons (HMP Five Wells and HMP Fosse Way) were opened in 2022 and 2023. The 2024 10-Year Prison Capacity Sub-Portfolio announced plans to create 6,500 new places in four prisons.

The new prisons have been designed to improve the health, well-being and safety of staff and prisoners and to reduce reoffending.

The new design aims to:

• Provide prisoners and staff with clean, bright, green and modern surroundings in which to live and work.
• Provide prisoners with more normalised environments (i.e. environments that resemble those outside of prisons) that can promote independence.
• Enable strong and supportive relationships between prisoners, with staff and with family/friends.
• Support prisoners’ rehabilitation by providing spaces for purposeful activity, rehabilitation and resettlement activities and meetings.

How are we helping?

RAND Europe, in collaboration with the University of Westminster, has been commissioned by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to carry out an impact, process and economic evaluation of the New Prisons Programme. The evaluation will be conducted between September 2024 and August 2027 and focuses on the two new prisons currently open (HMP Five Wells and HMP Fosse Way).

The evaluation has three main, cross-cutting aims:

• Build a rich picture of life in the new prisons, capture the implementation of the design and strengthen understanding of the contexts and mechanisms through which it may bring benefits.
• Produce timely, practical and useful evidence to inform whether to use the new prison design in future, and how to best design and implement prison regimes that use it.
• Provide evidence to support future spending decisions/business cases about the value for money of investing in the new prison design.

The process evaluation uses a theory-based and realist-informed approach to provide lessons learnt to the MoJ, HM Prison and Probation Service, and other relevant stakeholders throughout the project, to inform ongoing decision making and mobilisation.

The impact and economic evaluation approaches are being designed by the evaluation team as part of the study – but are intended to include a quasi-experimental design exploring the impact of being in a new prison on prisoners’ safety and a cost-benefit analysis.

Findings are expected to be published in early 2028.

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