‘We simply cannot afford to keep on building new prisons,’ said Mr Clarke, ‘from next week every prisoner will be told to stay at home and assemble their own cell.’

Under the scheme, convicts will be issued with an MDF flat pack prison from IKEA’s Klinka criminal storage range – ‘the compact and stylish solution to your prison overpopulation needs.’

The system has been imported from Sweden where every prisoner lives inside a space saving storage unit. ‘The IKEA prison cells are a fantastic design,’ said police inspector Kurt Wallander, ‘you would be surprised at just how many hardened criminals can be stored away in one living room.’

Mr Clarke insisted that even though they would remain at home, locked in a box, the flat pack lags would still get the full prison experience: ‘these convicts will be sent everything they would get in a regular jail,’ he assured, ‘food, water, pornography and heroin.’

To ensure that prisoners stay inside their cells, they will receive regular visits from freelance prison officers. ‘We have to make sure that they are not sneaking out,’ said Officer Colin Jubbs, ‘in the pilot scheme one of them did try to escape by attaching little castors to the bottom of his box and wheeling himself off down the street. We soon caught him and placed him in solitary at the bottom of the garden.’

Some convicts have expressed concerns about the DIY prisons. ‘I got half way through building my cell when I realised that the all-important bars at the front were missing,’ said career criminal ‘Mad Jack’ McClaverty, ‘in the end I was forced to visit IKEA, hold the staff at gunpoint and steal the missing parts in order to serve my sentence.’

‘Putting these bloody units together is punishment enough,’ said another, ‘and my cell keeps falling apart which means I keep waking up to discover that I have accidentally escaped. At least in proper prison this can’t happen because all the screws are present.’

‘This scheme is more than just a money saving measure,’ insisted Mr Clarke, ‘it keeps criminals off the streets, out of trouble and neatly packed away in storage,’ adding, ‘flat pack prison works.’

Swedish furniture giant IKEA claims to have drastically reduced the cost of a family funeral with it’s new self-assembly plywood coffin. The flatpack coffin comes in twelve ‘easy-to-assemble’ parts and can be put together ‘in under an hour’ by grieving relatives.

‘It was good to get my mind off things’ said bereaved grandson Geoff Cooper, 35. ‘I was tearful when I started to work out which bit went where. But after two hours I was shouting and swearing and throwing the little Allen key across the room. When we finally lowered the coffin into the ground, it fell to pieces and granddad’s limbs all fell out.’

But other families have welcomed the saving that the self-assembly sarcophagus represents. ‘We wanted to save cash on the coffin for our gran because we didn’t like her’ said Elizabeth Jamieson from Croydon. ‘So we got her to assemble the coffin herself before she croaked. It took her three and a half days to put it together. Ironically it was probably that what finished her off.’

Mike Brenman, 37, from Braintree had been to the furnishing store many times before, and analysts believe this may have contributed to his over-confidence in going ‘off-road.’

‘I did see the arrows on the floor but I only went in for a deck chair and a garlic crusher, so I thought it would be OK to try and cut across departments. But I just ended up back in the same place about 12 times. I see now how foolish my actions were, and I’m so very sorry for any distress caused to others, particularly my son who had opted to wait in the car.’

An IKEA spokeswoman stated that the incident served as ‘a valuable lesson for anyone planning on visiting an IKEA store.’ Unfortunately a shelf-unit Mr Brenman purchased as an afterthought was missing a vital retaining screw and so tomorrow he will have to spend another seven hours waiting in the returns department.