Andy Burnham only has a short time to prove he can keep the public safe, writes Esther Krakue (Image: -)
This week I found out that Estonia is renting out prison cells it doesn’t need, and Sweden is paying tens of millions a year to fill them. Denmark has done the same with Kosovo. France is at 140% capacity, with thousands of its prisoners sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The French would sooner live with that, and with the condemnation from Strasbourg, than let anybody out. We, by contrast, are so utterly bereft of any imagination that we prefer to send our finest burglars and killers back into the community. If they could be managed that way successfully, they wouldn’t have been imprisoned in the first place.
From October 1, most adults on standard sentences will be released after serving a third of their term instead of 40% or 50%, while a second group will go at the halfway point instead of two-thirds. That’s around 5,000 people over ten months. The government calls this the progression model, which implies there is something to progress towards. There isn’t. Nobody has to show they’ve been rehabilitated or that they’ve behaved themselves. They leave automatically on the date unless an adjudicator adds days for serious breaches of the rules, which makes it release you’d have to actively ruin rather than release you’ve earned.
I cannot put into words just how much of a national embarrassment the early release scheme is. How is it that just about every year now we find ourselves arguing about why releasing criminals is a monumentally stupid idea, apart from being an obvious affront to justice? This scheme was first introduced in 2007.
Are you trying to tell me that almost twenty years later, we still haven’t managed to build more prisons? It takes an average of seven years to build and open one – still too long in my opinion – so we have had time to do it twice over and then some. That is what happens in a failed state.
Of course, the government can harass us with pointless wildfire sirens, blaring out of every phone in the country as if the Germans were invading. Or even convene COBRA meetings to discuss the discovery that warm weather happens every summer. Yet at no point in the last two decades has any of them thought to sort out how to keep criminals in prison.
Among those set to be released are two of the three men convicted of the manslaughter of PC Andrew Harper, who was dragged behind a car along a country road in 2019 as his killers fled the scene of a theft.
His mother, Debbie Adlam, says her family is paying the price. The Justice Secretary, Alex Norris, says he would have excluded more offenders but that the system would collapse if he did. Which is to say we no longer sentence people for what they have done, but for how many beds we happen to have.
Then there’s the uncomfortable question of who supervises these men once they’re out. Our probation service is woefully overstretched and inadequate, to put it kindly. The Public Accounts Committee found staff were adequately assessing risk of harm in 28% of cases in 2024, against 60% in 2018-19.
The service met seven of its 27 performance targets last year. And one in five officer posts is vacant, with those in post have been working at an estimated 118% of capacity for years. Michaela Hall was murdered in her home in Cornwall by a man released a fortnight earlier whom probation had rated medium risk, despite 34 pieces of police intelligence about his abuse of her.
Which brings me back to the Estonians. Their prisoner numbers have been falling for years and Tartu Prison would otherwise sit empty, so they have leased it to the Swedes for at least £26million a year, rising to £52million once all 600 inmates have arrived.
The first of them were flown in this month. Denmark pays around £12million a year for 300 cells near Gjilan, in Kosovo, to hold foreign offenders awaiting deportation. Everyone has this problem. Only we have decided, rather stupidly, that the solution is to let people out.
Parliament can do whatever it likes. In 2020 it passed emergency legislation stopping the early release of terrorists and it took just two weeks. Last year it recalled itself and pushed the steel bill through every stage in a single day.
So when we are told that keeping these men inside isn’t possible, what is meant is that it isn’t a priority. Andy Burnham says keeping the public safe is his. He has until October to prove it.