UK to hold offenders in police cells amid justice system 'crisis'

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The UK government will hold offenders in police station cells as it said strains on prison capacity had reached a “crisis” following violent unrest across the country in recent weeks.

Operation Early Dawn, a pre-existing plan that allows the courts to hold offenders in police stations until there is a cell available in a prison, was activated on Monday morning.

“We inherited a justice system in crisis and exposed to shocks,” said Lord James Timpson, prisons and probation minister. “As a result, we have been forced into making difficult but necessary decisions to keep it operating.”

Since widespread disorder broke out in UK towns and cities following the stabbing of three children in Southport on July 29, hundreds of suspected rioters have been charged, mostly in the north of England.

The government pledged to respond with tough justice and the courts have in most cases held adult defendants on remand, rather than granting bail.

Jail sentences of up to six years have been handed down.

Downing Street said: “We expect this to be enforced for a short period of time, days or weeks, and kept under continuous review and activated or deactivated for these kinds of short periods as is necessary.”

The Early Dawn plan was enacted by the previous Tory government in May for a period of just seven or eight days, according to officials.

Speaking in Northern Ireland, Sir Keir Starmer said: “I'm not going to pretend that this isn't a challenge,” but blamed a “basic failure [of the last government] “to have enough prison places for the number of prisoners that were being sentenced”.

The prime minister stressed that the UK government remained committed to “swift justice” for those involved in the recent far-right violence. “We've been able to prove that if you commit disorder, you can expect to be put through the criminal justice system quickly.”

The Ministry of Justice said on Monday that the imprisonment of so many people involved in “violent thuggery on our streets” had exacerbated long-standing capacity issues in the prison system.

Prisons “have been operating at critical levels for the last several years, often with under 1 per cent capacity,” it said.

Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the Prison Officers' Association, said: “It has been an extremely pressured situation for several months now because we are so full, and that's down to the previous government.

“They closed 20 public sector prisons, they didn't build enough new prisons, they didn't create enough prison space and people are serving longer sentences,” he told the BBC.

“We work in the most hostile environment workplace anywhere in the world. “It’s absolutely horrible.”

The activation of Operation Early Dawn comes after the Financial Times revealed that UK officials considered interning prisoners on a dilapidated barge situated off Rikers Island in New York to deal with overcrowding in UK prisons.

England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe, with about 141 prisoners per 100,000 of population, according to the Prison Reform Trust. This compares with 106 in France and 67 in Germany.

The prison population is projected to increase to 114,800 by March 2028, up from about 87,400 at the end of July 2024. Capacity is 88,800 in England and Wales.

Mark Icke, vice-president of the Prison Governors' Association, told the BBC that there were currently about 18,000 people in custody “either convicted and unsentenced or still sitting on remand and have been sitting on remand for over 18 months”.

“We need to get those 18,000 people in front of the court because some of those people will be 'time-served' and that would take some pressure off the system,” he said.

In response to the new Early Dawn operation, Tom Franklin, chief executive of the Magistrates' Association, said the government tended to engage in a “big game of whack-a-mole”.

“The government of the day hits one problem in a short-term way only for something else to come up in the system,” he said.