Minister says £1 sale of Camp Hill prison to council in doubt

The prisons minister says the government is struggling to sell a former jail on the Isle of Wight, even though it's on the market for £1.

Rory Stewart said he was "very keen" to sell the Camp Hill site to the island's council for new housing but was unsure the deal would go ahead.

It emerged during a Justice Select Committee hearing on plans for the prison population after 2022.

MPs also heard about drug problems at Birmingham Prison during the hearing.

Referring to Camp Hill, Mr Stewart told the committee: "I'd be happy to pay [the authority] a pound to have it."

Isle of Wight Council said it was "undertaking the necessary due diligence" on Camp Hill to "assess any risks and liabilities, prior to considering any arrangements for bringing it forward as a regeneration opportunity".

HMP Camp Hill, built in 1912, became part of the Isle of Wight prison cluster in 2009, holding more than 500 inmates, before being closed five years ago.

Mr Stewart said: "We're trying to get rid of a site on the Isle of Wight at the moment. Very, very, very keen for the Isle of Wight Council to have it for them to build houses on it, affordable houses on it, but we're currently offering it to the Isle of Wight Council for a pound and they're still not certain."

Island MP Bob Seely said he had met Mr Stewart to discuss how the site could be brought back into use by the council quickly without "too many bureaucratic hurdles".

Mr Stewart told the committee the government's "new-for-old" prison strategy was not straightforward.

"When you actually look into the logistic difficulties of the refurbishment, the planning, the location of it, these places turn out to be not as valuable as perhaps some people thought in the past," he said.

During Tuesday's hearing, Mr Stewart also discussed Birmingham Prison, which an inspection previously found to be a "zombie warzone".

He told MPs the government was in "no rush" to hand back the running of the site to private security firm G4S.

The government took over Birmingham Prison in August as it had fallen into "a state of crisis".

Chief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke described it then as the worst prison he had ever visited.

The government said in the summer the prison would be handed back to G4S when sufficient progress had been made.

But Mr Stewart told the committee earlier it was in "no rush" to do so, and would only bring back G4S if "absolutely confident" the jail was under control.

Managing director of G4S custodial services Jerry Petherick told MPs the company had not made a profit from Birmingham Prison, the contract for which it was awarded in 2011.

He said maintenance had cost more than anticipated, with a reduction in capacity in November 2017 costing the company £1m.

The new governor Paul Newton said there had been "far too much violence" at the site, adding: "There's some green shoots [of recovery] about how that's staring to reduce."