Britain's most senior police chief has called for wide-ranging new powers to tackle homegrown terrorism, including a "rebuttable presumption" that anyone who visits Syria without prior notice should be treated as a terror suspect.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, chief constable of the Metropolitan police, also called for a return of control orders and said Britons who wage jihad in Syria or Iraq should be stripped of their passports.

Most significantly, however, Hogan-Howe became the first serving police chief to back Boris Johnson's proposal for the presumption of innocence to be overturned for Britons who travel to warzones.

Speaking on LBC, Hogan-Howe said: "If we can get an assumption that when people come back and have been to Syria they've been involved in terrorism. If they can prove they haven't then that's up to them. It's pretty hard for us sometimes to prove what they were doing in Syria.

"The state's failed, we can't talk to the police there very easily; I'm sure we could have good relationships but in the middle of a war … gathering evidence to put before a court of law in this country is quite hard. We need all the help we can get in that area."

The proposal, first aired in Johnson's Daily Telegraph column on Monday, has already been dismissed by Downing Street. The prime minister's spokeswoman said on Tuesday that David Cameron had no interest in "kneejerk" responses to the threat posed by Islamic State (Isis) militants following the brutal murder of American journalist James Foley. She confirmed that Britain's intelligence agencies had not been pressing for the London mayor's idea to be introduced.

In an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari, Hogan-Howe said "something like" control orders should be re-introduced to address the renewed threat from homegrown jihadis.

"Control orders were here before; they were stopped because the threat was reduced and quite properly it was seen as too intrusive to have that sort of control order. I think these things have got to be considered when the drumbeat changes and it's clear the drumbeat changed," he said.

The police chief, who commands the UK's biggest counter-terrorism operation, said it was debatable whether there should be a return to the previous control orders regime, which forced terror suspects to live in a certain area.

He said: "Whether or not we could go back that far is debatable because the courts started to strike them down. But when things changed like they have over this last few weeks … you've got to respond to that type of change."

The home secretary, Theresa May, has called for the introduction of banning orders for extremist groups alongside powers to stop radical preachers.

Hogan-Howe also called for would-be jihadis to be stripped of their passports, saying that those who fight overseas have "made a choice about where you want to be".

He said: "Certainly for us anything that either stops them from going or preferably stops them from coming back is a good idea. If it works, we should do that. It seems to me it's a privilege to have a passport and be a citizen of this country, and if you're going to start fighting in another country on behalf of another state, or against another state, it seems to me that you've made a choice about where you want to be."

Hogan-Howe's intervention came after Mark Rowley, Scotland Yard's head of counter-terrorism, revealed a fivefold increase in the number of arrests this year for terrorism-related offences. There have been a total of 69 arrests in the first half of 2014 for offences covering fundraising for terrorist activity, Rowley said.

Hogan-Howe said that up to 600 Britons have left the UK to join Isis, two-thirds of whom are from the London area. Asked whether police had enough resources to tackle the terror threat, he said: "I think we're going to have to look at the resourcing of it, within the Met or across the country."