Labour’s jail resolution to value taxpayers greater than £100million | Politics | News | EUROtoday

Labour is spending £4million of taxpayers’ on an empty jail choked with radioactive gasoline that may trigger lung most cancers, it has been revealed. HMP Dartmoor has been standing empty for 18 months after harmful radon gasoline pressured the evacuation of greater than 600 prisoners in July 2024.

But regardless of the Victorian jail being utterly unusable, the Government has signed as much as an eye-watering £100million contract that does not finish till 2033. The surprising waste emerged in a damning parliamentary report which revealed ministers are paying £4million a yr to lease a jail that can’t maintain a single inmate. On prime of the crippling annual funds, taxpayers are additionally on the hook for £68million in “fabric improvements” to the contaminated constructing over the identical interval.

MPs have condemned the scandal as “an absolute disgrace” and a “catastrophic failure” that represents a “needless waste of taxpayers’ money.” Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, a Conservative MP, blasted the Ministry of Justice’s dealing with of HMP Dartmoor as “an absolute disgrace, from top to bottom.”

He mentioned: “We heard claims that the leasing of this unusable building, known for years by HMPPS to be choked with radon gas with all the health risks that entailed, was sensible, driven by the need for prison places. Our committee rejects this excuse outright. Dartmoor appears to the committee [to be] a perfect example of a department reaching for a solution, any solution, in a blind panic and under pressure.”

He added that the “government must now respond to us on what it has learned from this catastrophic failure.”

Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gasoline that may trigger lung most cancers when inhaled over prolonged durations, making it not possible to soundly home prisoners within the constructing.

The Prison Service was conscious that Dartmoor was contaminated with the cancer-causing gasoline in line with the Guardian, but nonetheless dedicated taxpayers to a decade-long deal price £4million yearly till 2033, with an extra £68million earmarked for enhancements to the jail over the identical interval.

When the total scale of the hazard turned clear in July 2024, all 640 inmates needed to be urgently relocated to different jails, leaving the Victorian jail utterly deserted. Now Labour ministers discover themselves saddled with the poisonous deal, forking out tens of millions yearly for a constructing that sits empty and unusable.

The Ministry of Justice has tried to defend the choice, arguing that signing the lease was taken “when prisons were on the brink of collapse, threatening a total collapse in law and order.”

A MoJ spokesperson mentioned: “This government inherited a crisis in our prisons system, where prisons were on the brink of collapse, threatening a total collapse in law and order.

“This authorities is addressing the prisons disaster by way of constructing 14,000 new jail locations, and the Sentencing Bill which can ship punishment that works.”

But in October last year, the department’s permanent secretary Jo Farrar defended the move, telling MPs the decision to renew the lease on a prison that cannot house prisoners was “a smart and pragmatic resolution.”

That claim has been torn apart by the parliamentary report, which slammed the deal as a “useless waste of taxpayers’ cash” and demanded the Prison Service “set out what it has realized from the failures of its resolution making” and “be certain that any future contracts ship worth for cash.”