Britain’s most senior police officer has criticised ministers for failing to assess the impact on forces of its plans to release prisoners early.
Sir Mark Rowley said the scheme to free thousands of offenders early to ease overcrowded prisons would “generate a lot of work for police”. The Metropolitan police commissioner added: “Every time you put an offender into the community, a proportion of them will commit crime [and] will need chasing down by the police.”
He said the decision had been made “without any analysis of the impact on policing whatsoever”. Police forces were still waiting for government information on the type of offenders due for early release, he added.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “We’ve asked the Ministry of Justice for the data so that we can understand the exact detail of the types of offenders who will in the future be in communities, so we can work through what the consequence of that are.”
Rowley said the decision would further stretch the resources of police forces still struggling to recover from financial cuts. He said: “We’re carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts, and forces are much smaller when you compare the population they’re policing than they were a decade or 15 years ago.”
Rowley joined the head of MI5 and the National Crime Agency in writing to the justice ministry to predict that plans to release prisoners early could be to the “net detriment to public safety”.
The letter, first reported in the Times, argued police would need the “necessary resources” in the next spending review to deal with the plan’s impact and maintain order.
“We have to ensure that out of court does not mean out of justice, and that out of prison does not mean out of control,” they said.
Rowley also joined five other senior police to predict the government would miss its key crime targets without extra resources for policing. They predicted the next spending round could jeopardise Keir Starmer’s promise to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls and to appoint 13,000 additional frontline officers.
Rowley, the NPCC chair Gavin Stephens, and the heads of Merseyside, West Midlands, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire police cited the “increasing public demand, growing social volatility … and new serious and organised crime threats emboldened by the online world”.
The policing settlement in the chancellor, Rachel Reeves’s, spending review, due in June, would directly influence how forces performed, as many were losing officers and shrinking, they said.
“A lack of investment will bake in the structural inefficiencies for another three years and will lose a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the service,” they added.
The housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, has defended the government’s sentencing reforms. “The risk to public safety I’d highlight is the prospect of our prison system collapsing, which is what we face and why we’ve had to act,” Pennycook told Times Radio.
He said the government had inherited a system “on the brink” after “criminal neglect” by the previous administration. “They added just 500 places to the prison estate in their time in office, while at the same time, sentence lengths rose, and as a result, we got the prison population rising by approximately 3,000 people each year,” he said.
With capacity now close to zero, Pennycook said, the consequences of inaction would be severe.
The sentencing review released last week recommended measures to tackle prison overcrowding. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has agreed to allow some criminals, including violent and sexual offenders, to be released early for good behaviour.
She also agreed to scrap sentences of less than 12 months and to have more criminals serve their terms in the community instead.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are backing the police to protect our communities and keep our streets safe with up to £17.6bn this year, an increase of up to £1.2bn.
“This includes £200m to kickstart putting 13,000 additional neighbourhood police officers, PCSOs and special constables that the public will see back on their streets and patrolling communities, as part of our Plan for Change.”
A Ministry of Justice said: “This government inherited prisons in crisis, close to collapse. We will never put the public at risk by running out of prison places again.
“We are building new prisons, on track for 14,000 places by 2031 – the largest expansion since the Victorians. Our sentencing reforms will force prisoners to earn their way to release or face longer in jail for bad behaviour, while ensuring the most dangerous offenders can be kept off our streets.
“We will also increase probation funding by up to £700m by 2028/29 to tag and monitor tens of thousands more offenders in the community.”
