Peter Walker

speaker

987 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Sep

Peter Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Today in Focus · Prisons are full - who should be released early? · 14 Aug 2026 podcast

And it's a double problem, one of which is

More people are going to prison, but particularly they're being sentenced to longer and longer terms because every time you get a new government, a government says, we need to crack down on X, Y, Z. So they whack another five or 10 years onto this particular offence or that one.

And judges absorb all this.

So there's people in for much longer than they previously had been.

And you have a choice.

You either stop doing that or you build a lot more prison spaces because the forecast is...

At the current rate we're at, we have about 100,000 prisoners in England and Wales before too long.

It is amazing.

And this is why the probation officers union are saying more needs to be done because probation is an incredibly important part of this issue.

of rehabilitating people back into the society that they've left.

And unless that works properly, then prison is just a kind of exercise in basically ripping up £50 notes.

Andy Burnham has famously said he's a person who runs towards problems.

He wants to solve all these intractable issues the UK's got.

This is one of the ones that no politician in recent history has really dared to take on because then you're suddenly taking on the, you know, might of the tabloid newspapers, you know, people who've been victims of crime have a very, very powerful voice.

And it's a difficult thing to do.

If I had to guess, I don't think he's going to burn up a huge amount of political capital saying we need to send fewer people to prison.

I think he'll probably try and free up prison spaces and then, as other people have in the past, just build more jails.

Today in Focus · Burnham bounce: Labour overtakes Reform in polls – The Latest · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

In terms of an early election, if Labour was to go for it now, even if their poll lead grew a bit, you'd be leading your troops over the top of the trenches into the gunfire and knowing a lot of them wouldn't make it.

I wouldn't get carried away by any poll.

Reform UK do have problems at the moment, but they're still leading in a lot of polls.

Showing 421–440 of 987 · page 22 of 50