Nigel Farage’s plan to deport all foreign criminals from UK prisons has been backed by the party’s Prisons Adviser.
Speaking to GB News, ex-prison governor Vanessa Frake questioned “why the British taxpayer should pay” to keep foreign nationals in UK prisons.
At a press conference earlier today, Mr Farage and Reform UK Home Affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf detailed their plan to deport foreign nationals and build thousands of “Nightingale prisons” to expand the UK’s prison estate.
Mr Farage said: “Under a Reform Government, foreign criminals will serve their sentences abroad, not on British soil.
“We will transfer all foreign criminals to serve their sentence at home or in another country, freeing up 10,000 prison spaces, and build 12,000 Nightingale prison places within 18 months to create the prison capacity necessary to keep dangerous criminals behind bars.”
Throwing her support behind the plan, Ms Frake told GB News: “The prison service is in such a state that, yeah, it is going to cost money, there’s no doubt about that.
“But what’s the alternative? We early release people like the killers of PC Harper. Sometimes you’ve got to take the bull by the horns and do something rather than just sit back and say, ‘oh, well, the easy option is to just early release everybody’.”
Challenged on the choice of El Salvador as the country in which the deal will be struck, Ms Frake was pressed on whether it is “pretty harsh” to deport people to their prisons.
Nigel Farage’s plan to deport all foreign criminals backed by Vanessa Frake
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GB NEWS / PA
Ms Frake responded: “We’re not saying British criminals would be sent there, but look, if you come to this country and you commit crime and you get jailed, why should the British taxpayer pay for it?
“The hardest prison in El Salvador, most of it is gangland, but there are other prisons. It’s easy to say that we’re going to send them all to see CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo), because we’re not as far as I’m aware.”
As part of the plan, Ms Frake and Reform Chairman Lee Anderson will travel to El Salvador to begin talks with Nayib Bukele’s Government.
Ms Frake made clear: “When we go and visit some prisons in El Salvador, they will still have to meet certain standards. And nobody’s pretending that El Salvador has 10,000 places with Britain’s name on it, that would be irresponsible to claim that.
Lee Anderson will lead a delegation to central America within months for talks with Nayib Bukele’s Government | PA
“We haven’t decided on a date yet, because he’s [Lee Anderson] away then I’m away, but it will be soon.”
During their press conference earlier today, Zia Yusuf said Reform will “embark on the fastest expansion of the prison estate since the Victorian era”.
The party’s Home Affairs spokesman said: “Here at home, we will rapidly build capacity.
We will take advantage of new prefabricated modular technology and build 12,000 prison places in the form of Nightingale prisons on Ministry of Defence land, and the army will be called in to assist.
Ms Frake told GB News that the UK prison service is in ‘such a state’
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GB NEWS
“Together, these measures will create an additional 22,000 prison places compared to Andy Burnham’s plans.”
Mr Burnham’s spokesman has said manslaughter of an emergency worker was “not a standalone offence” and it was “not possible to simply exclude one or two offenders” within the wider category of manslaughter.
The spokesman said: “I think you’ve seen from the Prime Minister’s words that he’s far from accepting the situation and as he wrote last week he wants to go even further.
“He’s pushed hard on what more we could do and his focus now is on fixing the prison system long term to avoid a repeat of this prison crisis so that it never happens again.”