Reform UK would free up jail spaces in UK by sending offenders abroad, claims Zia Yusuf – UK politics live
Key events
Yusuf claims El Salvador jails for foreign prisoners from UK won’t be ‘fun’, but ‘won’t be cruel’
Farage and Yusuf are now taking questions.
Q: [From Jack Fenwick from the BBC] Are there other countries where you might send foreign offenders? And how much would this cost?
Farage said that some Baltic countries could house foreign prisoners from the UK, like Lithuania and Estonia. But El Salvador had “the most capacity”, he said.
And he claimed building Nightingale prisons (quick, cheap prisons – so-called after the Nightingale hospitals concept) would be “pretty cheap”.
He went on:
We have to admit that there might not be too many colour TVs.
And, referring to the jails in El Salvador, Yusuf said:
It’s not going to be a summer camp. It’s not going to be particularly fun. But it won’t be cruel and it won’t be unreasonable.
Zia Yusuf claims Reform UK could create 22,000 jail places by sending offenders abroad and building Nightingale prisons
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, is speaking at the press conference now.
He claims that a combination of sending foreign prisoners to serve their sentences in jails abroad, and building “Nightingale prisons”, could create an extra 22,000 jail spaces.
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.
Together, these measures will create an additional 22,000 prison places compared to Andy Burnham’s plans.
Turning to the foreign prisoners announcement (see 9.35am), Farage said that Lee Anderson, the Reform UK MP, and Vanessa Frake, a former prison governor who is now advising the party on prisons policy, would soon be going to El Salvador for talks about how the country might house foreign prisoners from the UK.
Farage said that not all prisons in El Salvador were “cages” like the ones seen on TV.
And he said putting foreign prisoners in jail in El Salvador would be halve the cost of housing them in the UK.
Nigel Farage is speaking at his press conference now. He started by talking about crime generally, claiming that Britain “is lawless”. And he repeated his (false) claim that in London people are so afraid of robbery that men do not dare wear watches and women do not dare wear jewellery.
Farage claimed that commentators who do not accept these claims are making the mistake of relying on national crime survey data. He said the crime survey was fundamentally flawed.
Early on Friday morning Nigel Farage will find out if he has beaten Count Binface, and all the 33 other no-hope candidates, and been re-elected as MP for Clacton. Farage will win easily, according to a poll last week.
This may come up at the press conference starting any minute now. And here are some other stories that journalists may raise.
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Farage called the byelection because he was wrongly advised that doing so would result in the parliamentary inquiry into claims he broke Commons rules by not registering a £5m donation from the cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne being permanently halted, it has been claimed. Olivia Barber has more details at Left Foot Forward here.
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Lord Ashcroft has published a poll suggesting that when people are asked who they think will win the next election (not how they would vote now), Reform UK is in third place behind Labour and the Tories.
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Reform UK has ruled out a deal with Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain unless it expels a co-founder accused of antisemitism, the Telegraph reports.
Economist and ex-minister Jim O’Neill reportedly resisting No 10 job offers partly over wealth tax concerns
Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs chief economist who served as a Treasury minister in David Cameron’s government, is resisting taking a job with Andy Burnham’s government because he is worried about the PM’s interest in wealth taxes, the Times is reporting.
O’Neill was brought up near Manchester and, like Burnham, he is a strong supporter of devolving economic power to the regions. Having O’Neill in government would do a lot to reassure the City about the government’s fiscal responsibility. But, in his story, Steven Swinford reports:
The Times has been told that Lord O’Neill of Gatley, a former Goldman Sachs economist and Treasury minister, has been offered significant ministerial and advisory roles but has yet to reach an agreement with No 10.
He is said to be concerned about putting his business interests, which include a science and technology investment company along with extensive shareholdings in banks, venture capital companies and private equity ventures, into a blind trust.
A Whitehall source familiar with the talks said O’Neill also had concerns about policy disagreements over issues such as potential wealth taxes, which have been advocated by some of Burnham’s other close allies.
Downing Street is likely to be asked about the story at the lobby briefing later.
Farage claims reported arrival of record 230 migrants on single small boat shows crossings are ‘security emergency’
A record 230 migrants arrived after crossing the Channel to the UK in a single boat on Monday, according to reports. The Press Association reports:
GB News said the “mega dinghy” left France overnight, arriving in Dover in the early hours.
The number breaks the previous record from July when 165 people successfully made the crossing.
People smugglers have been increasing the number of migrants crammed into boats in recent months.
A dinghy carrying 173 people capsized in the English Channel after its engine caught fire earlier this month.
The Home Office has been approached for comment.
In a post on social media, Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said:
At 2.30am this morning a boat carrying 230 people was taken into Dover.
This is a record number in a single vessel.
It’s yet more proof that this illegal invasion is a national security emergency.
Generally, small boat arrivals this year have been well down on the figures for 2025. At the end of last month, the total arrivals for 2026 were 45% lower than the equivalent figure for last year.
Green leader Zack Polanski accuses government of ‘gross negligence’ over climate crisis
With parts of Britain set to experience their fifth heatwave of the summer this week, Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has accused the government of not recognising the severity of the crisis.
In a statement, he said:
We are now facing the fifth heatwave in months following the recent deaths of 3,000 people in our country from extreme weather conditions.
This is the greatest crisis this country has faced since the second world war and to complacently dismiss the demands for immediate action by saying everything is under control is gross negligence, blatantly untrue and misses the severity of the crisis.
Only days after dedicated public servants talked about the need for urgent action, backed up by indisputable science, to secure our food supplies and the health of the most vulnerable, the Labour government says it’s all in hand, and supply chains are resilient.
At a press conference last week, Polanski said the government should be responding with emergency measures now.
Burnham vows crackdown on ‘rip-off’ business practices to ease cost of living – as Tories claim he’s ‘run out of ideas’
Andy Burnham has promised a series of measures to tackle the cost of living, including a ban on fake discounts and making it easier for people to escape unwanted subscriptions, Aletha Adu reports.
Burnham has written about his plans in an article for the Guardian.
These two announcements are extensions of measures already in the pipeline under Keir Starmer.
The opposition parties are not impressed. For the Tories, shadow chancellor Mel Stride said:
Andy Burnham has already run out of ideas.
The cost of living didn’t become a problem last week, so you have to ask why it has taken Labour so long to enact legislation passed by the previous government.
Stride was referring to the fact that the new rules making it easier to cancel subscriptions involve implementing measures originally in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 passed when the Tories were in office.
And, for the Lib Dems, Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader and shadow Treasury spokesperson, said:
We Liberal Democrats have long called for stronger consumer protections and we want to see the government go further.
If the new PM is serious about this, he should introduce strengthened protections against rogue traders, make energy bills fairer by giving everyone a discount on their essential usage, and clamp down on the big supermarkets’ unfair shrinkflation tactics.
Labour says Farage has ‘no serious answers’ to prisons crisis, as Reform UK proposes jailing foreign offenders in El Salvador
Good morning. Andy Burnham has said Middlemarch is his favourite novel, but he may not remember George Eliot’s line about the genial businessman Mr Vincy who “blustering as he was, had as little of his own way as if he had been a prime minister”. Burnham only took over in No 10 three weeks ago today. But already he is learning that Eliot had a point about the constraints of office.
As PM, Burnham became responsible for the prisoner early release scheme due to come into force in September, which is hugely controversial because it will lead to killers, rapists and sex offenders being released early. Burnham immediately said he was “pausing” the scheme pending a rethink, and early last week he announced he was changing the rules to make the scheme more restrictive. Explaining the move in an article for the Daily Telegraph, Burnham said that he “wanted to go even further” but that the plan he was announcing “pushed to the very limits of what is possible to do.” He added: “I know I can look people in the eye and say to them there is nothing more I could have asked for without risking the prison system reaching capacity and collapsing within months.”
But if he thought that would quell public and media anger about the plan, he was wrong. The new rules won’t affect two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper, who will still get early release under the scheme, and Burnham is now reportedly considering a further crackdown to ensure they are included (which, if it goes ahead, would undermine the ‘nothing more he could do’ claim in the Telegraph last week). Even if Burnham manages to exempt the Harper killers, it won’t be long before media organisations start focusing on other emotive stories about criminals being released early. The Daily Express has an example this morning.
And this morning the Daily Mail has opened up another line of attack on the policy, highlighting Tory claims that the early release scheme will lead to “around 500 added sex offences, nearly 1,800 violent crimes and just under 36,000 thefts before the end of this parliament in 2029”. The Ministry of Justice has dismissed the report as “highly speculative” and based on “an inaccurate method of calculating the impact of sentencing reforms”. It says: “Without [the early release scheme], we risk prisons reaching capacity and collapsing. If that happened, police could not make arrests, courts could not remand offenders and there would be unchecked criminality on our streets.”
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is now leaping in with his own alleged solution. Reform says it will free up space in jails in England and Wales by rapidly deporting all foreign offenders “to serve their sentences in countries like El Salvador and Kosovo”. In a post on social media, Farage is highlighting a Sun story saying “following initial conversations with the El Salvador government about renting prison spots, party chairman Lee Anderson will lead a team of officials for a visit later this year”. Farage is also proposing building “Nightingale prisons” to create extra spaces. He will be giving more details at a press conference later with Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson.
In their London Playbook briefing for Politico, Dan Bloom and Megan McElroy highlight some of the obvious problems with this.
Yusuf [says] Reform will deport “all 10,000 foreign nationals from our prisons.” Of the 10,134 foreign nationals in custody in England and Wales, nearly a third are on remand, i.e. they haven’t been convicted of a crime yet. A Reform official confirmed foreign nationals will only come in scope of the party’s scheme if and when they’re convicted. Then there are questions about what’d happen after inmates in Kosovo finish their sentence (Reform would put a lifetime ban on returning to the U.K.). Or matters like El Salvador’s human rights record — though Playbook can imagine how Farage will respond to that one.
Commenting on the Reform proposals, a Labour spokesperson said:
Keeping the public safe is and always will be Labour’s first priority. The government has already made clear we are working at pace to deport foreign criminals and we’re building more prison places to deliver justice for victims and keep criminals behind bars.
Reform have no serious answers to the Tory prisons crisis and would lead the system to collapse. This would result in a free for all for dangerous and violent offenders, including murderers and rapists. Nigel Farage and Reform simply can’t be trusted to keep Britain safe.
Burnham is back from holiday this week, and is due to start a summer tour of Britain soon. But we have not been told to expect him out today.
So there are only two items on the agenda.
11am: Farage and Yusuf hold their press conference.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
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