The prison watchdog accused the Home Office yesterday of failing to carry out proper planning to provide enough space in jails, resulting in offenders sleeping in court cells.

Anne Owers said that without proper resources and management, offenders would simply be recycled in and out of jails through a perpetually revolving door.

In her most scathing criticism since becoming Chief Inspector of Prisons five years ago, Ms Owers accused ministers of trying to build an ark after the flood. She said that a huge increase in prison numbers and lack of cash was an “alarming and potentially extremely damaging combination” for the jail service in England and Wales.

Her criticism came hours after a serious disturbance at Dovegate jail at Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, in which prisoners trashed a wing, setting fire to wastepaper bins, flooding cells and destroying televisions.

Officers at the jail, run by a private company called Serco, were forced to withdraw from the wing on Monday night until reinforcements arrived to enable them to regain control. Thirty inmates have been moved to other jails in the public and private sectors and 30 to other parts of the jail.

In her annual report Ms Owers said that the current overcrowding crisis in prisons was making jails riskier places to run. She spoke as the Prison Service was given some relief after an overnight fall of 200 in the numbers in jail during the past seven days. Ms Owers said that this had caused a huge sigh of relief in the Home Office and provided a breathing space. “We simply cannot accommodate people. We certainly won’t be able to throw up buildings in time to do so.”

In a devastating rebuke to successive home secretaries, she added: “It is normally considered good practice to build the ark before the flood rather than during it or after it. This means long-term planning. I warned last April that we would hit the buffers in autumn and we did. We have reached a different set of buffers. The house was full in the autumn. It is now overcrowded.”

Ms Owers said that she could not see an easy way out of the crisis in the immediate future but refused to be drawn on whether John Reid should consider the early release of thousands of low-risk offenders in order to ease the crisis. She added: “I worry at the moment that as fast as quick-build units will be put up, they will be filled.”

Her annual report states that there are already signs that the overcrowding crisis is leading to falling standards. She said in her introduction to the report: “We have seen too many local prisons recently whose cultures and practices are sliding back, or failing to improve.”

A Prison Service spokes-woman said that Ms Owers had spoken to Mr Reid yesterday in what was described as a helpful meeting. She added that projecting the prison population, now at 80,000, was “not an exact science”.

Gerry Sutcliffe, the Prisons Minister, said: “I am heartened by the Chief Inspector’s recognition that, despite continued population pressures, significant improvements continue to take place in many key areas of prison life.”

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