Journalists tear apart Reform’s bizarre prison plan

Reform UK’s bizarre plan to deport all 10,000 foreign nationals from British prisons was probed by journalists at a press conference today.

Nigel Farage and Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, announced the policy this morning, and were soon met with questions about how it would work and how much it would cost.

Reform has said it would deport migrants from UK prisons to their home countries, or Kosovo and El Salvado, in a policy that mirrors what Donald Trump is doing in the US. 

He also repeated the party’s pledge to build pre-fab Nightingale-style prisons which he said would hold 12,000 people. 

BBC journalist Jack Fenwick asked Farage whether Reform had taken into account the cost of renting prison places abroad, in addition to the cost of deportations and legal challenges.

The journalist asked: “What’s your assessment of how much all this would cost?”, and quizzed him on whether Reform had thought about doing deals with any other countries.

Farage mentioned that Reform would consider having conversations with Lithuania and Estonia too, but said El Salvador has the most capacity.

The Reform leader said: “That’s the reason we’re going to send Lee Anderson and former prison governor Vanessa Frank […] to make sure the conditions are sensible and reasonable.”

Farage vaguely claimed that the cost of the party’s plan to put foreign nationals in prison abroad will be “half per prisoner”.  He added that the plan “is going to save us over the next decade several billion pounds”.

On the cost of building Nightingale prisons, Farage “well, frankly pretty cheap, just as would the Nightingale hospitals”. 

He added: “They would be pretty basic and we have to admit that there might not be too many colour TVs.”

Farage was then quizzed by another journalist about whether the policy was a Trump-style reaction to Labour’s rise in the polls under Andy Burnham.

They asked: “Is this a serious, workable policy or is this a Trump-style reaction to the Burnham bounce and your party’s falling polling performance?”.

Farage responded: “Well look, Sweden send prisoners, foreign prisoners to Kosovo, so I think if Sweden do that and operate that principle as well as America operating that principle, I would have thought that was a very grownup way of approaching it.”

Asked about the Nightingale prisons he has proposed, Farage said they would hold a lower category of prisoners, such as shoplifters, but that “it’s not going to be a summer camp” and they would be secure.

With Farage’s vague costings and thus far a lack of any agreements with countries abroad to rent prison places, Labour has accused Reform of having “no serious answers” to the prisons crisis they inherited from the Tories. 

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward