Villagers near two planned ‘super prisons’ complain the developments are being ‘railroaded’ through by the government and are making it hard to sell their homes.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is spending £4.7billion to build a total of three new jails near existing ones in a bid to create 14,000 new places by 2031.
One of the planned prisons is on green belt land north of HMP Wymott and HMP Garth in Chorley, Lancashire – where residents say drug-carrying drones already blight daily life.
At another site, HMP Gartree in Leicestershire, builders hope to start the main construction phase later this year – after the previous secretary of state, Michael Gove, overruled local planners.
While officials promise the new jail will create 600 jobs and inject millions into the local economy, residents complain it has been ‘shoehorned’ into ‘scenic’ countryside.
Margaret Coy, 73, had long ridden her horse on the land when it was just a quiet bridleway flanked by green fields, but is now unable to access it after diggers began preparatory works.
She told : ‘I think it’s a waste of nice scenery to be honest. It’s obviously been pushed through, so we haven’t really got a say in it.
‘They should be thinking of the normal people who use this land. We can’t do that now because there are diggers there, which makes me very sad.’
Jo, a 49-year-old district councillor, bought her house ten-years-ago due to its countryside views.
‘Initially I was a member of the Gartree action group and we fought against the new prison, then obviously it went to appeal and Gove overruled it,’ she said.
‘I feel like we’ve just been railroaded over here, that’s the only way to describe it. There used to be sheep all over and now we wake up to diggers.
‘That is all owned by the MoJ and they rented it to farmers. I bought this house five years ago because it was next to all the fields and such a peaceful place to be.
‘Now it’s all diggers, it’s horrendous. They’re 8am until 6pm, Monday to Friday. I had to fight to stop them doing Saturday mornings.
‘If that goes through and they start to, my life will be hell.’
The existing HMP Gartree can hold 700 men, but the new site will house 1,700.
‘We’re going to have over 2,000 prisoners on our doorstep – more than three times the amount at the moment,’ Jo continued.
‘My other fear is if they change it to a category C. I think it would be worse because you don’t get much hassle with a category B.
‘But I’ve heard that category C can get really bad outside, with people waiting for them and trying to get drugs in.
‘The MoJ aren’t the greatest neighbours. All these prison officers turned up at 4.30am the other morning and were talking loudly. They woke everyone up.
‘It splits the street as some people work there and the rest just live here.’
Jane Huxley, a 71-year-old who lives in nearby Foxton, said the scale of the new jail would cause problems.
‘It’s not that there’s a problem with having a prison in the neighbourhood – we’d have one for years – but this is huge and I have no idea how they’re going to staff it,’ she said.
‘It’s going to cause traffic problems too.’
Diana Cook, 76 – a parish councillor in the village of Lubenham – said: ‘If we really need the prisons, I appreciate they have got to go somewhere. But we told them this was the wrong place.
‘It did not have sufficient access for building and operation.’
Reece Richards, 42, who lives locally, raised concerns about the impact on property prices, claiming that people were struggling to sell their houses.
‘No one wants a new prison. We’ve already got one – we don’t need another,’ he said.
The pattern of government ministers overruling planners was repeated in Chorley, Lancashire, which is set to host a new 1,700-capacity prison alongside the existing HMP Wymott and HMP Garth.
A previous refusal by the planning inspectorate was recently overturned by housing minister Angela Rayner.
Myra McHugh, 82, is a keen bowler at Wymott Bowling Club – which will be knocked down and replaced with the new prison’s entrance.
She said: ‘The main thing that really aggrieves me is it’s gone to appeal several times, it’s now on its final appeal I believe.
‘On several of those appeals, we have been backed – we have had specialist surveyors down and they say the roads are not fit for all the traffic.
‘Angela Rayner, after the last appeal when all the specialists had said ”no, the roads aren’t fit”, she just went ”oh it’ll be alright”.
‘She’s never been near the place, she doesn’t know it. But she thinks it’s going to be fine when all the experts say it’s not.
‘That’s my main grievance because we’ve been fighting this for probably nearly three years now.’
Local horse riders and dog walkers were upset about the loss of green space – with trees and greenery set to be ripped up as part of the plans.
Dave Williams, 64, was tired and fed up with the planning process.
Having lived on Wray Crescent for 20 years, he said: ‘They’ve not considered locals whatsoever, no consideration.
‘It’s going to destroy part of the green belt, there’s a multitude of not just the fauna, like animals and birds that use that land, cyclists, walkers.
‘Through the Covid period I’d never seen so many people walking and cycling around here, never.
‘It’s going to take five years to construct, there are going to be larger than 40-tonners, 200 a day – one every 90 seconds.’
He added: ‘When you look around and see what the infrastructure is – they’re talking about a prison where prisoners can actually be rehabilitated and get back into society.
‘Look at what we’ve got around here, there’s no trains, there’s an hourly bus service into Chorley and Preston – so how are the prisoners going to get around?’
Late last year, HMP Garth, an open prison, was described as ‘like an airport’ by prison inspector Charlie Taylor due to the volume of drugs being flown in by drone.
One couple who live near the prison site, who asked not to be named, said people in the area were selling up to try to get away.
Now, they say, they’re stuck as they face a loss in value if they try to sell up.
The mother-of-two, who has lived in the area for four years, said: ‘It’s very rural, and now I don’t even know what we’re going to have, but I’ve heard it’s going to be three or four storeys.
‘There’s a lot of issues, my partner was working nights the other day, it was after nine and there were fireworks going off.
‘It was like they’d set them off in our garden, they do that as a distraction, there’s loud bangs, the dog’s going mad.
‘The speeding cars that speed around to the other side of the prison and set more off over there so they can send drones in a different way. It’s for drug and phone drops.’
Another horse rider in her late 50s, who asked not to be named, said she thought the death penalty should be brought back in to keep the prison population down.
Parish councillor John Dalton, 61, said: ‘I moved here 19 years ago, I knew the prisons were here, all the residents knew the prisons were here.
‘We have no objection to living in this area with two prisons very close by, obviously the prisons are in an enclosed area, so we don’t have a problem.
‘This is one of the safest areas in Lancashire to live. You can leave your cars open, you can leave your front doors open – there’s not a problem with there being two prisons here.
‘The major problem with the third prison is the entrance to the prison.
‘As anybody is aware of the area, it’s very congested, very narrow – those are the major concerns of the residents, there’s no concern over a new prison, it’s the siting of the entrance to the prison.’
The third prison will be located near HMP Grendon in the village of Grendon Underwood, Buckinghamshire.
At a press conference last week, Shabana Mahmood said Britain could not simply ‘build its way’ out of the prison capacity crisis, as she revealed new rules aimed at freeing up space.
This includes a standard 28-day ‘recall’ period for released prisoners who are locked up again for breaking the rules – even those who commit new offences.
Currently, freed inmates can be kept behind bars for the rest of their sentence if they are recalled.
The new policy will free up 1,400 spaces in prisons amid the overcrowding crisis. Officials said if no action was taken, they would run out of space by November.
But Ms Mahmood was accused of presiding over a ‘recipe for the breakdown of law and order’, while victims’ groups voiced alarm at the move.
Ms Mahmood repeated doom-laden warnings she first deployed last summer when she introduced a scheme allowing most inmates to be freed after serving just 40 per cent of their sentences, and which led to lags popping champagne corks outside prison gates.
She said: ‘The consequences of failing to act are unthinkable. If our prisons overflow, courts cancel trials, police halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished and we reach a total breakdown of law and order.’
There were 13,600 recalled prisoners behind bars in March. About a fifth are sent back to jail because they have committed fresh crimes. Ms Mahmood said the 28-day recall period will apply to criminals serving sentences of between one and four years.
has contacted the Ministry of Justice for comment.