The cost of a new prison in Glasgow being worked on by Kier will be bigger than the combined capital budget of the Scottish Prison Service for the next three years, it has emerged.
Speaking to the Scottish Parliament’s justice committee on Wednesday, Justice Secretary Angela Constance said she expected the price tag for HMP Glasgow to be more than £400m, despite previous estimates of around £170m. free.
The true cost will only become clear after the designs are finalized in April, he added.
Conservative MSP Russell Findlay highlighted that the annual capital budget for the Scottish Prison Service is £97m in 2023-24, £192m in 2024-25 and £80m in 2025-26, making a total of £369m of pounds
He said this is less than the full expected cost of HMP Glasgow and asked service officials: “How on earth can you expect to pay for it, given these sums?”
Constance replied: “The new HMP Glasgow is […] a high priority; decisions will obviously have to be made about the gradual classification of resources.
“This is not a one-year investment or project, but I don’t think there is any mistake in anyone’s understanding that we will have to replace the slightly Victorian HMP Barlinnie.”
As Glasgow’s only prison, the 19th century HMP Barlinnie is no longer fit for purpose. Its governor, Michael Stoney, said the BBC in August that it was operating at 140 percent of its capacity and that it was at risk of “catastrophic failure.”
Kier was appointed to carry out pre-construction services for the new facility in July 2022 and presented a master plan in December 2022.
Labor MSP Pauline McNeill criticized the pace at which the project was progressing and was “deeply concerned that it seems to be taking forever to build a prison”.
Constance said, “We won’t know [the] timescale until we know the costs and we won’t know the costs until we have the final designs, that’s the bottom line.”
McNeill said: “It is not fair for the committee to stay with the government’s perception or [prison service] which is just something in motion all the time. I know it’s complicated, but at this point I feel like it’s a bit of smoke and mirrors to not fix anything for a project that needs to be a priority.”
Constance said: “Not being a builder I would share some of that frustration but I know the Scottish Prison Service and particularly the governor of Barlinnie are very focused on this.”
He went on to say that the pandemic and material price inflation had affected the project budget.
The SNP minister rejected another MSP’s suggestion that she commit to putting an overall cap on the cost above which the project could not rise, saying she knew other schemes had been disrupted by factors such as Brexit and the labor shortage.
“Given the start time, it is difficult to rule out the possibility of any event disrupting the plans […] There are all kinds of things that can happen,” he said.
