People will “have to accept” a new prison being built in their neighbourhood, says Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood given the scale of the jail crisis.
She also signalled that punishments for offenders, such as home curfew, could be increasingly used to stop so many of them going to prison.
Fewer criminal cases are also set to go to crown court given the lengthy backlog delaying justice being delivered.
The Cabinet minister partly blamed planning delays thwarting plans for new prisons which led to the new Government having to resort to emergency releases of thousands of prisoners earlier this year.
On the planning hold-ups, she told LBC Radio: “That’s not acceptable when you have got a growing crisis in your prisons.
“I think your listeners would accept that whilst everybody might have a gripe about some planning in their local area, overall I hope we can all agree that prisons are absolutely critical national infrastructure, they have to be delivered and the nation simply can’t be in a position where we run out of prison places.
“We were days away from running out of prison places, we can’t allow that to happen, we do have to build and I’m afraid people are going to have to accept that sometimes that build might be somewhere near them.”
The Government is aiming to build four new prisons within the next seven years in a bid to grip the overcrowding crisis, but says other reforms including on sentencing are needed to address the rise in inmates.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) pledged to find a total of 14,000 cell spaces in jails by 2031.
Some 6,400 of these will be at newly built prisons, with £2.3 billion towards the cost over the next two years.
The remaining places will be found by measures including building new wings at existing jails, or by refurbishing cells currently out of action, and an extra £500 million will go towards “vital building maintenance”, the department said on Wednesday.
Prisons will be deemed sites of “national importance” amid efforts to prevent lengthy planning delays, and new land will be bought for future prisons, the MoJ added, with approval for the new developments expected to be made within 16 weeks.
The announcement comes after official estimates published last week indicated more than 100,000 prisoners could be held in jails in England and Wales by 2029.
This followed warnings from Whitehall’s spending watchdog that Government plans to boost prison capacity could fall short by thousands of cell spaces within two years, and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds more than anticipated.
Since September thousands of inmates have been freed early in a bid to cut jail overcrowding, by temporarily reducing the proportion of sentences which some prisoners must serve behind bars in England and Wales, from 50% to 40%.
But prisons are still expected to reach critical capacity again by July next year.
MoJ figures show there were 86,089 adult prisoners behind bars in England and Wales on Monday.
The so-called operational capacity for English and Welsh men’s and women’s prisons is 88,822, indicating there is now cell space for 2,733 criminals.
Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the money earmarked for opening new jails “would be better invested in securing an effective and responsive probation service, working to cut crime in the community”.
