CONCERNS about the running of Preston Prison have been highlighted after it was revealed that it is one of the most overcrowded in the country.

The problems at the jail, which has 539 inmates and holds most of East Lancashire's convicts, have been highlighted by former Home Secretary Lord Hurd.

The Tory peer launched a fierce attack on the number behind bars claiming it damaged the chance of preventing inmates reoffending on release.

And he accused Home Secretary and Blackburn MP Jack Straw and Tory Shadow Ann Widdecombe of competing to see who could overcrowd the country's jails most.

Today a spokesman for the prison service admitted that as a local prison, Preston was on of the more overcrowded in the country. Lord Hurd admitted that when he was Home Secretary between 1985 and 1989 the problem was "a raging fever" with many city police station cells crowded with prisoners that could not be accommodated in mainstream jails. What we are now faced with is a deep underlying sickness.

"Preston is 81 per cent overcrowded; Shrewsbury is 74 per cent overcrowded; Northallerton is 62 per cent overcrowded. You cannot run a prison decently in those circumstances.

"All the efforts to deal with matters about which reformers rightly worry -- education, training, treatment for drug abuse and the all important link between prison and what happens to a prisoner after release -- are weakened and frustrating by overcrowding.

"Yet Ministers and Opposition leaders fail to acknowledge this problem head on. In the fashionable phrase, they are to some extent 'in denial'. In my most depressed moments, I sometimes think that the contest over law and order in the forthcoming election will amount to who can overcrowd our prisons most."

Mr Straw's Junior Minister Lord Bassam said: "I cannot accept the allegation that there is much badly wrong with the service. I believe there is much good in our prisons." He said since Mr Hurd's time in the Home Office overcrowding had halved while the total population behind bars had increased.