Yorkshire's largest prison had just eight free spaces ahead of government enacting emergency overcrowding plan

It was activated by the Ministry of Justice yesterday across Yorkshire and North of England, where the riots were at their most fierce.

Sir Keir Starmer said: “These decisions are really tough decisions, and nobody wants to take them.

“They are having to be taken for one reason and one reason only, and that is the terrible inheritance on prisons that we had as an incoming government from the previous government. 

“There was a basic failure … to have enough prison places for the number of prisoners that were being sentenced to prison.”

This was exemplified by HMP Doncaster, a category B prison operated by private contractors Serco in Marshgate.

It’s the largest prison in Yorkshire, and yet on July 26 just eight of its 1,145 places were free.

HMP Leeds, the second largest prison in the region, was 99 per cent full, as was HMP Wakefield, the category A prison known as Monster Mansion.

Neither prison had any spaces freed up compared with the previous month, and this data was collected before the riots.

Yasmeen Sebbana, an associate director at think tank Public First, wrote a report on the crisis with the Community Trade Union earlier in the year.

She told the Yorkshire Post that “it’s hard to underestimate how bad” the situation is across the region.

“Even earlier in the year, prison capacity was so limited and there were so many reports of prisoners double bunking,” she said.

“The part of the story that gets slightly forgotten is the impact this has on prison staff, when it comes down to their levels of personal safety.

“This creates such a knock on effect because when they don’t have enough prison staff to run a prison at full capacity, prisoners have to be kept in their cells for longer.

“In some prisons you have prisoners spending 23 hours a day in their cells.

“If you think about the impact that that has on their mental health and their ability to be rehabilitated.”

“It’s becoming a very, very dangerous situation,” she added, saying the last government did “not adequately deal with” the crisis.

The latest prison capacity data was collected before the far right riots, which will certainly have increased the strain on the already creaking system.

Almost 100 rioters have now been sentenced in Yorkshire and the Humber, and the region has the highest number of convictions nationally.

The Prime Minister admitted that the “additional strain of the disorder of recent weeks” had taken its toll on an already crumbling justice system.

But he added: “We’ve taken tough decisions, we’ve been able to prove that if you commit disorder, you can expect to be put through the criminal justice system quickly, and we will continue in that vein.”

There are concerns Operation Early Dawn will impact police operations as well as the wider justice system.

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

“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.

“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.