Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 15 November 2016.
An interesting point, but it’s not quite as easy as that, because we don’t have a self-contained prison estate. For example, you’d still to need to buy in, as it were, prison places in England, at a price that England wanted to charge—we’d have no particular control over that. We lack certain high-security prisons as well, so all this has to be examined to make sure that we don’t end up with control over prisons, which in principle, actually, I’ve got no objection to, but end up with a financial deal that’s far, far worse. Unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, we’ve never had that self-contained prison system. It is something, of course, that we’ll have to consider when we look at the devolution of prisons.