Nick Ferrari isn’t who Labour supporters usually turn to for backup. His interview with Conservative MP Matt Vickers gave them some anyway.
Vickers, the Conservative deputy chairman and shadow minister for crime, policing and fire, came on LBC to attack the government’s plans to release thousands of prisoners early. There are genuine questions for Burnham’s government here: roughly 5,000 prisoners are due for release over ten months from October, after Burnham pulled around 1,000 offenders out of the scheme, excluding those convicted of rape, serious child sexual offences and grooming, while some violent offenders stay eligible. Victims and their families have criticised the changes hard, especially after it emerged Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, convicted of manslaughter over PC Andrew Harper’s death, could still qualify.
Vickers had a real point to make: public protection and prison capacity should be priorities. The trouble started when Ferrari asked him to account for how Britain got here.
Ferrari kept coming back to the numbers
Vickers opened by claiming the Conservatives ran “the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era.” “The number of prison places was going up. There were plans in place to build more.” He then accused Labour of letting capacity fall, claiming 450 fewer places than a year earlier.
Ferrari brought it back to the previous government’s actual record. “Is the Prime Minister right when he says 500 places were added in 14 years?”
Vickers tried to qualify it: “He would also be right if he said that…”
Ferrari cut in. “So he is right. Clearly he is right. That’s lamentable, deputy chairman.”
Vickers countered that 14,000 places had opened under the Conservatives. That figure didn’t touch Ferrari’s actual question, the net increase after old and unusable capacity got removed.
Ferrari pushed again, raising Burnham’s claim that 23 prisons closed under the Conservatives. “He, Mr Burnham, says you closed 23 prisons. Is he wrong with that?”
“What he is wrong is not to prioritise the opening…” Vickers started.
Ferrari cut back in: “So he’s right. So you closed 23 jails. You have a net growth of 500 places, and now you’re crying foul at the Labour government. Don’t you think this is the inheritance you left them?”
Vickers still wouldn’t accept the framing, insisting the current government should prioritise building.
Where the 500 figure actually comes from
Ferrari wasn’t quoting a Labour talking point. Ministry of Justice data published in October 2024 showed operational capacity across the prison estate stood at 89,757 in May 2010 and 90,239 in April 2024, a net increase of 482, rounded to 500. The same release said roughly 13,009 places were built between May 2010 and August 2023, against an estimated 12,514 closed over the same period, though the department cautioned against simply subtracting one figure from the other, since some spaces get taken out of use, repurposed, or reopened later.
A later National Audit Office report calculated the net increase between May 2010 and September 2024 at 1,005 places, measuring five months further on rather than contradicting Ferrari’s number. More importantly, the NAO concluded the wider prison crisis came from previous governments handing down longer sentences and hiring more police, driving up demand for cells, while the estate itself went through years of underinvestment and maintenance failures that took capacity offline. The NAO found prisons had been running near full capacity since autumn 2022, and that a planned 20,000 extra places, originally targeted for the mid-2020s, isn’t now expected to finish until 2031.
The Conservatives used early release too
Vickers was entitled to press Labour on who qualifies for early release, whether victims were properly consulted, and what safeguards exist once people are out. What Ferrari wouldn’t let him do was talk about early release as a crisis invented since the Conservatives lost office.
Rishi Sunak’s government introduced the End of Custody Supervised Licence scheme in October 2023, initially letting prisoners out 18 days early, later extended to 35, then up to 70 days. 10,083 prisoners were released under it between October 2023 and June 2024. Labour then brought in its own wider SDS40 policy, releasing eligible prisoners after 40% of their sentence, arguing the system was otherwise close to running out of space entirely.
The current row is about further reforms Burnham inherited from Starmer’s government. He paused the policy for an urgent review before announcing extra exclusions. The government says it can’t cut back much further without risking the whole system collapsing. Critics say the line’s still in the wrong place, particularly with some manslaughter and domestic abuse convictions still eligible. Both of those arguments deserve real scrutiny. So does the record of the government that left the estate with almost no room to absorb anything more.
How it landed online
The clip spread fast, and plenty of the praise came from people who wouldn’t normally call themselves Ferrari fans.
@triffic_stuff_ said he’d given Vickers “a proper dose of home truths,” adding the Conservatives had “zero credibility” on prison capacity after years of neglect.
@sjdharters: “Everything wrong with politics in one clip. Until we employ people that take accountability, we’re fucked.”
@lizmcshane: “good to see @Matt_VickersMP getting owned by Ferrari for once.”
@AmeliaRocket1: “What the fuck did the Tories do with our money for 14 years?”
@Peter_POSH: “Excellent. Spot on. The Tories need to shut the fuck up on this one.”
@JamieJones77 compared it favourably to BBC coverage: “Even Nick Ferrari managed to find the context.”
None of that removes responsibility from Labour. Burnham’s the prime minister now, his government is approving these releases, and it’ll be accountable if the policy goes wrong. What it does mean is that Conservative politicians can’t credibly talk about the current shortage of prison places as if it appeared the moment they left office. Ferrari gave Vickers several chances to say so. He didn’t take any of them.
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