Ministers have been forced to trigger an emergency measure to house prisoners in police cells as jails run out of space.
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has enacted Operation Safeguard, which allows the prison service to hold prisoners overnight in police cells.
Ms Mahmood told parliament on Tuesday that the prison estate was operating at more than 99 per cent occupancy, with only 824 places remaining in the adult male estate on Monday.
The plans will free up hundreds of cells for use but could cost the government millions of pounds. When the emergency measures were activated between February and the end of July 2023, it cost £30.2 million.
Responding to the announcement, the Police Federation of England and Wales said that the use of police cells would keep officers “away from their core policing duties”.
Custody lead for the federation, Paul Williams, said police officers would have to “face dangers they are not equipped to deal with”, saying that Operation Safeguard would be an “added burden on the police service which is already overstretched and overburdened”.
The announcement comes after a damning report from the Public Accounts Committee found that the prison estate was “in crisis” due to overcrowding. They concluded that the previous government’s plans to create 20,000 more prison places by the mid 2020s were “completely unrealistic”.
Thousands of outstanding spaces are expected to be delivered five years late with costs spiralling to £4.2 billion - 80 per cent more than originally planned.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that Operation Safeguard was triggered “to stop our jails from running out of cells”.
They added: “We have always said that would only be a temporary relief, while we build 14,000 new prison places and reform sentencing to ensure our prisons reduce reoffending, cut crime and make our streets safer.
“Operation Safeguard is a well-established process that will help manage temporary capacity pressures, ahead of the new 1,500 capacity HMP Millsike opening in a few weeks’ time.”
The emergency measures are reportedly going to be used for eight weeks, although they could be extended. Ministers hope to only use around 200 of the over 400 police cells available, with capacity easing in May when the new York prison HMP Millsike opens.
David Gauke, the former Conservative lord chancellor, is currently chairing a sentencing review commissioned by Labour to look into alternative solutions to the prison overcrowding crisis. In an initial report, published last month, Mr Gauke said the the crisis had been fuelled by politicians’ attempts to seem “tough on crime” and called for a new approach from Labour.
Prisons minister Lord James Timpson has previously argued that Britain had become “addicted” to punishment and that jails were predominantly full of “broken” people.
In an interview after he took on his government role, Mr Timpson said that the reason why there were “so many people in prisons is because of reoffending”, adding: “You’ve got to get the reoffending levels down otherwise you’re permanently in a state where you’ve got to keep building more prisons”.
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