Scheme to house prisoners in police cells costs £30,000 a night

AN EMERGENCY scheme to hold prisoners in police cells to prevent overcrowding in jails has cost an average of £30,000 per night.

The prison service paid out almost £40 million under Operation Safeguard, launched in February to help cope with a sharp rise in the jail population in England and Wales, figures disclosed to Parliament by Damian Hinds, the prisons minister, show.

Between February and September prisoners were housed in police cells on 1,272 occasions because jails were too full. Payments to police forces totalled £38 million. That works out at around £30,000 a night, the same as the yearly cost of housing a prisoner in a jail, and 30 times the £1,000-a-night cost of a room at the Ritz.

The MoJ has now halted the scheme after introducing an early release programme. Figures on Friday showed the prison population has stabilised at 1,200 below operational capacity of 88,943, compared with less than 500 below at the peak of the crisis.

Mr Hinds said: “Operation Safeguard is a contingency measure that provides additional headroom if prisoners cannot be accepted from the courts or police custody. There are no additional costs to the taxpayer and any spend under Operation Safeguard comes from existing departmental budgets.”

The biggest payout went to West Midlands Police, which was paid £6.6million. It was reimbursed £600 for housing a prisoner on a weekday, and £800 at a weekend.

However, some police forces received six-figure payouts for putting cells on standby to accept prisoners even though no prisoner was ever housed.