Mr Reed said Labour had found problems “we could not have known during the election” because the Conservatives had not released information and in “some cases deliberately covered it up”.
“We are finding additional pressures in year that nobody knew about and the government had not disclosed,” he said.
He accused Rishi Sunak of hiding warnings by civil servants of a “critical failure” in the prison system that meant “by August there would be no prison places left”.
Instead of taking action, Mr Sunak “called a general election” and “covered up that information until after the general election”, the environment secretary added.
While the government publishes weekly figures showing prison numbers, Mr Reed said these were published “in arrears” so were not up to date.
Labour has announced plans to release thousands of prisoners early from the start of September to prevent a “total collapse” of the prison system and a “total breakdown of law and order”.
Mr Reed also argued the true scale of the cost of the Rwanda scheme was not revealed until “Yvette Cooper is appointed home secretary, and goes into the department”.
Last week Ms Cooper said the Conservative’s plan to remove some asylum seekers to Rwanda had cost taxpayers £700m – nearly double the price tag previously in the public domain. The new figure includes additional costs such as civil service salaries and detention costs.
Mr Reed said of his own department: “We are finding that the condition of flood defences is far worse than we were led to believe.”
He added:”That therefore puts more pressure on the public finances if we want to sort that out.”
He said: “We want to move away from this government of secrecy to a government of openness and transparency”.
Pushed on whether Labour were revealing these figures now in order to lay the foundations for tax rises, Mr Reed repeated Labour’s election promise “not to increase taxes on working people”.
But on Sky news Mr Reed did not rule out increases in capital gains, inheritance tax and taxes on pensions.
He said: “The core of what we want to do is not to increase taxation, it is to grow the economy because that way we can get the income we need without recourse to taxation.”
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