Met chief Mark Rowley warns of London’s mounting court delays

Sir Mark said the number of defendants being charged by the Met had risen from about 4,000 a month two years ago to 7,500 a month, despite the force becoming smaller.

He also warned that prison overcrowding and the government’s early release scheme were creating additional pressures for policing.

Referring to further releases due to take place, he said: “Tomorrow we’ve got more prisoners being released under the early release scheme”, after “700 earlier on in the month”.

Sir Mark said ministers had inherited a prison capacity crisis and “had to pull some urgent levers” because “they didn’t have any choice”.

While stressing he was not criticising the decision, he said the consequences were being felt on the front line, with officers increasingly required to manage offenders in the community who would previously have remained behind bars.

“There is a significant issue if you’ve got offenders in communities who police are trying to manage the risk of when historically they wouldn’t have been there, they’d have been in prison,” he said.

He added: “It’s going to take real vigour and pace and imagination to fix a system which is now in this position.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Within weeks of coming into office, the prime minister and justice secretary took action to keep more of the most serious criminals locked up.

“But we have been honest about the scale of the crisis we inherited in our prisons. If we had failed to act, the police would have been forced to halt arrests, putting communities at untold risk.”

The spokesperson said ministers were building new prison spaces, increasing victim support funding and giving probation greater powers to impose strict restrictions on released offenders.