A new sentencing regime in which judges punish offenders according to cost was called for by the former Lord Chief Justice today.

Lord Woolf told MPs that the Home Secretary could not “build” his way out of the crisis of prison overcrowding.

Instead, there should be an end to the “open-door” policy for prisons and a cap on prison numbers, he said.

Judges would follow guidelines that took account of the cost of jailing offenders compared with a community penalty, Lord Woolf told the Home Affairs Select Committee.

“I think judges should know how much the sentence he imposes is going to cost...that is a very relevant matter, and if there is a suitable cheaper option, they should choose that option.”

He added that the public should be made aware that if they want people in prison, they could do that - but they should know the cost in terms of another school, teachers or a hospital.

The aim was to reduce further offending, but just putting more people into jails would not, alone, do that, Lord Woolf added.

He called for the current Sentencing Guidelines Council, which advises on sentencing, to be remodelled along the lines of the Bank of England with a five-year budget for prisons.

The independent council would be told: “These are the resources that the Government can provide for the prison population and you must see that your sentencing guidelines achieve a prison population within those resources where the commodity of a prison space is used in the most constructive way.”

Judges would have to comply with the guidelines, he said. “Judges would have no right to say: we would have imposed a higher sentence. Because if this was the guideline, it would be the right sentence.”

The Council should be given a “clear mandate to do something about overcrowding in our prisons.”

No administration had been prepared to grasp that nettle, he told MPs and he conceded that it would be “a brave government to say we’re not going to have an open door policy for prisons in this country; we have many people in prisons now who don’t need to be there.”

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