Plans to release violent criminals, including sex offenders, from prison early will make Britain less safe without more funding, the heads of the Metropolitan Police, MI5 and the National Crime Agency have warned.
The senior police and security chiefs have publicly called on ministers to provide “serious investment” at next month’s spending review – piling pressure on Rachel Reeves to rethink her strct borrowing rules.
In a joint letter to the Ministry of Justice, seen byThe Times, they argue that, without the “necessary resources” the decision to release more people early could be “of net detriment to public safety”.
In a separate statement, six of Britain’s most senior police chiefs – including Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley – warned Sir Keir Starmer that he will not be able to deliver his flagship pledge to cut crime without serious investment.
The officers, including the chiefs of Merseyside, West Midlands, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire police, and the head of the National Police Chiefs Council, argued forces needed more money and more officers to deal with “increasing public demand”.
As well as new online threats from organised crime, they said the emergency release of prisoners to alleviate overcrowding in prisons and recommendations in the sentencing review to free inmates earlier would put more pressure on policing.
It comes ahead of next month’s spending review – a line-by-line audit of government outgoings which will set departmental budgets for the coming years – where the chancellor is expected to announce real-terms cuts to the Home Office budget.
But she is facing growing questions over whether she will be able to stick to her fiscal rules, restrictions the government sets itself to constrain its own decisions on spending and taxes, amid mounting spending demands.
Downing Street has insisted that there will be no changes to the chancellor’s fiscal rules – saying they are “ironclad” – but the recent U-turn on cuts to the winter fuel payment and reports that ministers are considering lifting the two-child benefit cap are adding to the squeeze on Treasury coffers.
Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme on Wednesday morning, Sir Mark said that while the government’s pledges on law and order were “balanced and sensible”, they were also “very, very ambitious”.
He said: “We’re carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts, and the effects of that. Forces are much smaller when you compare the population they’re policing than they were a decade or 15 years ago.”
However, he insisted that police forces were “not just asking for more money”, but wanted “radical reform” as well.
It comes after Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood last week agreed to allow some criminals, including violent and sexual offenders, to be released early for good behaviour as part of a series of measures to tackle prison overcrowding. She also agreed to scrap short sentences of under 12 months and have more criminals serve sentences in the community instead.
The government has said the changes will ensure prisons do not become overcrowded, blaming the previous Tory administration for failing to build enough prison places.
But Sir Mark warned that ministers have not properly considered the impact of this policy on policing.
“They’ve done no analysis on the impact on policing. No analysis of that whatsoever. So that has been settled without any analysis of the impact on policing, the effect on us”, he said.
