THE future of a women’s jail near York is still in doubt - seven years after plans to close it were announced and a year after a watchdog hailed it as one of the best prisons in the country.

The Government revealed in 2013 that it was planning to shut Askham Grange, an open prison in Askham Richard, as part of plans for women to serve sentences nearer home.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said it wanted female inmates to maintain family relationships and to improve their job prospects before leaving jail.

But the closure still hasn’t gone ahead and the Chief Inspector of Prisons rated Askham Grange last year as one of the best performing jails in the country, awarding it the highest grading of ‘good’ in all four Inspectorate ‘healthy prison tests'.

Chief Inspector Peter Clarke said relationships between staff and prisoners were "extraordinarily strong" and this "played a huge part in achieving the goals of building women’s confidence and self-esteem en route to eventual release".

He said the prison was clean, living conditions were good, very few prisoners said they had felt unsafe, the provision of learning and skills was "outstanding", there was hardly any violence and levels of self-harm were very low- "a welcome finding when the levels of self-harm elsewhere in the women’s estate are so troubling".

He said continuing uncertainty over the jail’s future needed to be resolved as soon as possible, adding: "The prisoners clearly benefit enormously from what it can provide. It would be good to think that in the future Askham Grange might remain as an example of what can be achieved, and not fade away into a memory of what was once an exceptional establishment.”

However, the Prison Service says the closure decision has still not been revoked, although a spokesman said yesterday there were "no immediate plans" to close the jail.

He referred to a Government announcement last month that it was to fund the first ‘Residential Women’s Centre’ in Wales - an alternative to custody focused on rehabilitation for women convicted of low-level crime, offering services to tackle causes of offending, such as substance misuse and mental health problems, and enabling them to stay closer to home.