This is the closest the prison service has come to running out of space in male jails, although officials at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) were hoping on Tuesday that they would not have to introduce further emergency measures.
The MoJ has already activated Operation Early Dawn, under which defendants are kept in police cells until prison spaces become available.
Starmer: October Budget will be painful
In a speech in the garden of Downing Street, the Prime Minister claimed that his Government had done more in seven weeks than the Conservative government did in seven years.
But he warned that “things are worse than we ever imagined” because of a £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances. Read more on the five taxes Labour could target in the October Budget here.
