The woes of G4S are continuing with the announcement today that the security solutions firm have lost the contract to run Wolds Prison in East Yorkshire.
The prison will return to being publically operated when the current contract expires in July 2013. G4S have held the contract since the prison was opened in 1992.
Prisons Minster Jeremy Wright told the BBC that the decision not to renew the contract with G4S had nothing to do with the Olympics and that their bid was simply “not compelling enough”.
A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice said “Our evaluation has concluded that it would be more beneficial to allow the current contract to expire and the prison to revert to public sector management.”
The decision is in spite of the fact that the Ministry of Justice are currently evaluating bids for private companies to start operating HMP Northumberland – an amalgamation of two smaller prisons – Moorland, Hatfield and Lindholme prisons.
Sodexo, Serco and MTC/Amey are the three remaining bidders in these contracts.
G4S have failed to secure the contracts to any of the nine prisons that were in consultation to become privately operated.
G4S’ share price fell by over 6% following the announcement this afternoon, but has recovered slightly to 256.4p at time of writing.
A spokesperson for G4S said: “As the leading private provider of prison management in the UK, we have 20 years of experience of running prisons for the Ministry of Justice.
“Our performance across all six prisons we run has been to a high standard with every aspect of performance either meeting or exceeding the key performance indicators applied by the MoJ.
“We look forward to discussing the contract award decision with the MoJ within the next few days to determine why we were unsuccessful.”
