Operation Early Dawn: emergency plans to avoid prison overcrowding activated across Yorkshire

Emergency plans have been urgently activated to avoid prison overcrowding Yorkshire and the North of England as more rioters are sentenced.

Operation Early Dawn, a long-standing plan which allows defendants to be held in police cells and not summoned to magistrates’ court until a space in prison is available, was activated on Monday morning, the Ministry of Justice said.

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The measure will be put in place in Yorkshire and the North East; Cumbria and Lancashire; and Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire regions. Prisons and probation minister Lord Timpson said: “We inherited a justice system in crisis and exposed to shocks. As a result, we have been forced into making difficult but necessary decisions to keep it operating.

“However, thanks to the hard work of our dedicated staff and partners, we have brought forward additional prison places and now introduced Operation Early Dawn to manage the pressure felt in some parts of the country.”

National Police Chiefs’ Council custody lead Deputy Chief Constable Nev Kemp said: “We are working closely with criminal justice system partners to manage demand in the system and ensure that the public are safe.

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“Policing will continue to arrest anyone that they need to in order to keep the public safe, including policing protests and events and ensuring that people are arrested as expected.”

However Mark Fairhurst, national chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said that some police operations may have to be delayed until there are free cells in prisons.

“It’s justice delayed at the moment, because we’re not clogging up police cells, so they might have to delay some of their operations,” he told BBC Breakfast.

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“When they arrest people, they’ve got to make sure they’ve got them a custody space in police custody, because we might have prisoners filling up their cells. Of course, they have got to pay overtime to supervise prisoners.”

He said the most serious offenders would still end up in court and be guaranteed a prison cell, but less serious offenders would either spend longer in police cells or be bailed.

After the riots that broke out across England following the stabbing of three girls in Southport, a total of 460 people had appeared in magistrates’ courts in relation to the disorder by the end of Thursday.

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This has included dozens of people in Leeds, Sheffield and Hull, as well as in Teesside.

Operation Early Dawn was previously triggered by the Conservative government in May in a bid to tackle overcrowding in jails. The Tories also brought in an early release scheme to deal with prison overcrowding.

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For the next 18 months, certain convicts will be freed after serving 40 per cent of their sentence, including those involved in the riots.

It does not apply to those convicted of sex offences, terrorism, domestic abuse or some violent offences.

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