Andy Burnham predicted to make his first U-turn as early release scheme 'could cause chaos'

Andy Burnham may be forced to "back down" on his pause of the early release prison scheme as it could "cause chaos", it has been claimed.

Speaking to GB News, crime journalist David Shipley predicted that the Prime Minister may need to U-turn on his pause of the scheme, pending an "urgent review".

The scheme, introduced under Sir Keir Starmer's Government, is set to begin in September with thousands of criminals becoming eligible for release.

However, following outrage from survivors of grooming gangs and the widow of PC Andrew Harper, the Prime Minister has put the scheme on hold to review who can be released early.

TRENDING

Stories

Videos

Your Say

Discussing the pause on GB News, Mr Shipley warned that the move could "potentially cause chaos".

He said: "I suspect what will actually happen is that Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary and the current Permanent Secretary of the MoJ Jo Farrell will come to him, show him the terrifying charts, and I think he's probably going to have to back down on this.

"Because once you exclude the sex offenders, the killers, there's another couple of thousand people who they were expecting to release in the autumn who won't get released, and that might quite quickly mean no capacity in the prison system."

Asked how vast the population of such criminals are currently in UK prisons, Mr Shipley revealed that they make up around "20 per cent" of the prison estate.

He told GB News: "I think what happened initially was when they began this scheme, they were going to exclude domestic abuse and violence, sex offenders, killers, this sort of thing.

"The problem is once you start to exclude those categories of prisoners, you're eliminating quite a lot of the men on longer sentences, and suddenly the arithmetic of how this might reduce the capacity crisis starts less appealing."

Mr Shipley added: "I think the problem we've got is the Prison Service has identified a really effective system for them of dealing with capacity, you don't have to build that many more prisons, they just release people.

"I think the incentive is to expand it and what they're saying, of course, is if they don't do these releases, then by November we'll be out of space again."

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

• Chris Philp shut down over lack of prison places under the Tories in fiery GB News grilling
• Wes Streeting refuses to resile from Israel remarks after 'war crimes' accusation
• Andy Burnham faces backlash over social care funding plans as PM told 'death tax is not the answer!'

Mr Shipley suggested that the prisons could instead look to prioritise the release of female prisoners instead of men.

He said: "If you release the bulk of people on short sentences, they're often quite prolific offenders, so then you would drive a spike in reoffending, they'd probably be back in quite quickly. So that is a problem.

"I think what might be more effective is to look at maybe releasing quite a large number of women prisoners who generally don't really pose a threat to the public, freeing up one or more women's prisons to be converted into men's prisons. That seems like a very quick way of creating more capacity."

The crime journalist also pointed to the open prison estate as a solution for the Labour Government.

He said: "I think another route might be to look at the open prison estate, we could expand the open state very quickly.

"You can put down prefab prison cells for those sorts of prisons in weeks, a bit of concrete and they go down.

"And they would create capacity. I think we might be able to move around 10,000 of the lowest risk prisoners into an open prison so they're not being released early, they're still able to be controlled in some way and we can get them working and paying taxes."

Justice Secretary Alex Norris has said: "The pause is aimed to give victims and survivors certainty, and the Government wanted to make sure that it got the implementation of this policy right."

The Prime Minister has said: "No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we've conducted an urgent review and done everything that we can to minimise risk to the public. Where changes are needed, we will not hesitate to make them."

Our Standards: The GB News Editorial Charter