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Nigel Farage has committed to spending more than £17bn on policies to halve crime in the UK if he becomes prime minister at the next election.
The Reform UK leader said his proposals, which include constructing five ad-hoc “Nightingale” prisons and deporting more than 10,000 foreign criminals, would be paid for by scrapping HS2 and net zero.
At a press conference in London, Farage pledged to force councils run by Reform to host new prisons “if they’re the right locations” and to recruit a “higher and physically tougher” standard of police officers.
A three-page document published by Reform said the total estimated cost of its crime and justice policies was £3.48bn annually, with £2.1bn a year spent recruiting 30,000 more officers and £1bn on creating 12,400 prison places.
Other pledges include spending £250m a year on renting prison places abroad in countries such as El Salvador and Estonia, and £80m a year on creating 100 pop-up custody centres in crime hotspots to speed up arrests.
Asked how his party would fund these commitments, Farage said: “We are advocating cutting huge amounts of public spending, starting with the utterly failed, abysmal HS2 project, which the government is quite happy to spend £50bn to £70bn more on over the course of the next few years. And we’re talking about the cost of net zero.”
Farage said successive home secretaries had contributed to a deterioration in public trust over crime and created conditions that were “nothing short of societal collapse”. “People are scared of going to the shops. Scared to let their kids out. That is a society that is degraded. And it’s happening very, very rapidly,” he said.
Defending people who had joined violent demonstrations outside an asylum hotel in Essex, he said: “I don’t think anybody in London even understands just how close we are to civil disobedience.”
Farage used the press conference to pledge that his party would be the “toughest party on law and order and on crime that this country has ever seen”. “We will aim to cut crime by half in the first five years of Reform government. We will take back control of our streets. We will take back control of our courts, of our prisons,” he said.
“If you’re a criminal, I am putting you on notice today that from 2029 or whenever that may be, either you obey the law or you will face very serious justice.”
Farage revealed he was “in conversation with Edi Rama”, the Albanian prime minister, over sending prisoners there but admitted he had not spoken to the government in El Salvador.
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Asked about El Salvador’s human rights record and overcrowded prisons, Farage appeared to backtrack slightly from the plan. “People will be tried in this country and El Salvador may be quite an extreme example. But the idea that we could send prisoners to Kosovo, to Estonia is a very, very serious proposal,” he said.
Asked about his past defence of James McMurdock, who was elected as a Reform MP despite having a previous conviction for assaulting a girlfriend by repeatedly kicking her, he said: “The reason that I did defend then as strongly as I did, he was a very good case for somebody who had rehabilitated, who had gone on to live a constructive life, when so many young lads from his part of the world, after their first brush with the law, go on to spend the next 40 years in prison … Do we believe there should be rehabilitation? Absolutely we do.”
McMurdock gave up the Reform whip earlier this month amid questions over his eligibility for £70,000 in bounce-back loans he took out during the pandemic.
