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The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has hit back at the UK’s most senior police officer in a row over the impact of allowing thousands of criminals to serve their sentences in the community instead of being sent to jail.
The Ministry of Justice insisted on Wednesday that officials “consulted with police” including the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, over proposed changes to sentencing policies introduced to ease prison overcrowding.
Hours earlier, Rowley had said that the scheme to free thousands of offenders early would “generate a lot of work for police” and claimed that the decision had been made “without any analysis of the impact on policing whatsoever”.
The clash came as public servants lobby the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in the expectation of budget cuts from the spending review on 11 June. Mahmood has insisted that she must take drastic action to cut prison overcrowding or risk the collapse of the criminal justice system.
Recommendations from David Gauke’s sentencing review, which proposed less jail time for thousands of offenders including some violent criminals and domestic abusers, were accepted in principle by Mahmood last week.
These recommendations would allow prisoners in England and Wales to be eligible for release after serving a third of their sentence, and would drop short custodial sentences for nearly all offenders and allow suspended sentences for up to three years.
On Wednesday morning, Rowley told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme that the plans would “generate a lot of work for police”.
“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,” he said.
Rowley said the decision would further stretch the resources of police forces still struggling to recover from financial cuts.
“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,” he said.
Responding to Rowley, a government source said that police, including Rowley himself, had been consulted by officials and politicians in the months leading up to the publication of the review. Rowley met Mahmood last week before the sentencing review was published, it is understood.
“The department and David Gauke consulted with police. The justice secretary accepted the recommendations ‘in principle’, but always said that further detail would come forward with the bill. The impact assessment will be published when the bill comes before parliament,” the source said.
Officials from the Ministry of Justice are currently drawing up legislation based on the elements that were passed in principle before parliament. They hope that a bill could be put forward before summer recess.
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Police remain concerned that the principles have been drawn up before the impacts upon policing have been taken into account. A police source said: “More criminals in the community will result in more work for police officers. After a decade of keeping things on an even keel, the cash reserves have been eaten through.”
Rowley also 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, sent before the sentencing review was published, 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 officers 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.
