It’s becoming increasingly clear John Reid’s “plan” to build some new prisons is nothing of the sort. Today he tells us the project is “in the planning stages” so he doesn’t know how many cells will be built in each year, how much will be spent in each year, or really anything useful whatsoever.

The total cost estimate has gone up by £200m, though, since September when it was only going to cost us £1.5bn.

There are serious problems even with the two new prisons that Reid announced today - the Home Office still doesn’t have planning permission for the one in Woolwich, and even if everything does go to plan, the prisons will only deliver an extra 1300 places. Not much use when official estimates say the prison population could hit 102,000 by 2012.

What we really need is a wholesale rethink of the prison estate and the use of custody - and as luck would have it the Liberal Democrats have had a go already - you can read Nick Clegg’s proposals here.

We’ve known for a long time that the government doesn’t have a clue how many illegal immigrants there are in the UK. This makes a certain amount of sense - the whole point of being illegal is you try to stay out of the way of officials, even official statisticians.

But now John Reid claims he hasn’t the faintest idea how many people are in the country legally either, saying:

“It is not possible to say with accuracy how many legal immigrants are present in the country, because there is currently no means of counting those who leave the country of their own accord without informing the immigration authorities.”

OK, so it might not be possible to give an exact figure - but not even an estimate? Can they not make an educated guess? How are they going to get all these people to register for a biometric immigration document (aka foreign national ID Card) if they don’t know how many there are?