Every jail in England and Wales is being closely monitored by senior officials for signs of unrest over concerns for the stability of the prison estate.
There were fears that hours of rioting at Birmingham prison on Friday could lead to copycat incidents.
Concerns were heightened when trouble at Hull prison at the weekend was said to involve inmates moved there after Friday’s unrest, which was described as the worst prison riot since Strangeways in 1990.
Liz Truss, the justice secretary, will make a statement to parliament today on the Birmingham disturbance. The Ministry of Justice was said to have been warned this summer about inadequate staffing levels there.
Ministers and the head of the prison service were advised that there were “insufficient staff” to cope with the day-to-day demands of running the Victorian prison, which houses 1,469 inmates.
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A report from Birmingham’s independent monitoring board urged a review of staffing levels but it is not known if action was taken.
Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Parole Board and a former chief inspector of prisons, said that the prison population, which stands at 85,583, needed to be reduced to avoid further riots.
“We are not prepared to pay for the size of the prison population that we now have. The balance between the prison population and the number of staff we have got is now unworkable,” he warned in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s World at One.
Rob Nicholson, chairman of the Hull branch of the Prison Officers Association, said that the 1,000-inmate prison was on the “brink of a riot” following the arrival of about 15 inmates from Birmingham.
He said: “It is a powder keg and it’s waiting to go off. They are trying to incite riots here and we’ve had a really bad couple of days. I’ve spoken to very experienced prison officers this morning and they tell me they fear for their safety.”
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Prisoners had been confined to their cells in a lockdown imposed after CCTV cameras were damaged by inmates transferred from Birmingham, he claimed. Prison sources confirmed that some prisoners from Birmingham had “kicked off” yesterday because they were unhappy at being transferred but said that staff quickly resolved the situation. They also said that a prisoner from Birmingham had smashed CCTV in the induction unit but was quickly moved to the segregation unit. They denied the CCTV had been “torched”. The source denied that the whole jail was in lockdown.
Last night a Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “HMP Hull, like all prisons across the estate, is being closely monitored for signs of potential unrest. That includes managing the transfer of prisoners in the interests of maintaining safe, calm and normal regimes.”
More than 240 inmates from Birmingham jail have been moved to other prisons, including Parc in south Wales and Oakwood near Wolverhampton. They left the jail in vans after about 160 prison officers trained in anti-riot techniques brought the disturbance to an end within 45 minutes of entering the prison on Friday night.
Two wings of the jail, run by the private company G4S, are likely to be out of action for several weeks after being left uninhabitable because of damage to the electrics. The loss of so many prison spaces will put pressure on other parts of the overcrowded system. Ms Truss, facing her biggest crisis since taking over as justice secretary in the summer, is not expected to announce any new initiatives but will seek to re-assure MPs and the public today that the government has a grip on the problems engulfing the prison system. She has already won extra Treasury money to recruit 2,500 frontline staff, following a fall in numbers from 25,903 in March 2010 to 18,004 in September this year.
The justice secretary is likely to face questions about what caused the disturbance and whether it was linked to simmering frustrations among prisoners being forced to live on a restricted regime because of staffing problems.
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In the summer the jail’s independent monitoring board said it was their view, supported by prison staff, that there were “insufficient staff numbers to deal with many of the day-to-day situations that occur in a local prison”.
The Ministry of Justice did not respond to a request from The Times about whether any action had resulted from the warning.
Birmingham has about 500 staff in total but about 22 prison custody officers left between September and November. It is understood G4S has little difficulty recruiting custody officers, who start on £20,300 a year, but there have been problems retaining staff.
Steve Gillan, general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, said: “We no longer have a properly resourced prison system . . . it is going to take a good few years to get back to where we should be.”