Home Office and Ministry of Justice

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Kieran Mullan

Monday 29th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Mullan]

My hon. Friend is right, and I will discuss his point in more detail. My hon. Friend said, “words to the effect”, but that was the exact wording that Ministers used in this Chamber, on the Government website and in press releases: the Government said that the most serious offenders would be excluded. When we challenged that, behind the scenes—and even on live television, on Sky News—Ministers said that what we were saying was not true; as we now know for sure, it was.

Labour tells us that this move is necessary. I imagine that Labour Members who genuinely care about these issues have been told by Ministers that here is nothing else they can do—that they have no choice and it is all because of the prison overcrowding crisis. I want to tackle that in detail, because that is not true. There are always different choices to be made.

The estimates before us, explaining the spending that is planned on prisons and prison spaces, highlight that most of the Department’s capital budget is allocated to the prison programme, which was awarded £7 billion up to 2030 in the recent spending review. Ministers know that their planned prison space numbers are essentially the same as ours were. The Minister also knows that the prisons that the Government have opened were paid for and started by the last Government. I share the frustration that Ministers at the time felt with the challenges in prison building; this Government already know how that feels at first hand, considering they have failed for more than a year to do anything significant about a major prison building contractor going bust. Nevertheless, more spaces are due to come online. So what we are managing is a short-term challenge.

I have spoken before about my preference for the justice system to be a greater public and political priority, which the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller), also spoke about. Others, including the hon. Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell), talked about the long-term lack of prioritisation of this issue. As a result, early prison release is absolutely not new. The previous Labour Government released 80,000 prisoners early, and the previous Conservative Government also operated the same early release programmes; Labour has used the exact same programme that the previous Government used and then implemented one of its own. These programmes allow for a Government to manage prison capacity in order to tackle the sorts of challenges mentioned by Ministers and Members on the Government Benches.

Previous projections are also unreliable and have forecast much higher prison populations than is currently the case. In fact, the prison population was projected to reach 90,000 by June 2019, but it did not hit that figure —it never has. So is the plan to release rapists and child groomers an essential short-term measure? No, it is not. It is a permanent long-term change to our sentencing laws that will have a profound impact on victims and the ability to secure justice. It is also being done in a fundamentally different way from other early release programmes.

Early release schemes have historically excluded serious violent and sexual offenders, but this Government are deliberately and specifically choosing not to do that. We warned the Government repeatedly that their exclusions based on sentence type were flawed, but they simply said again and again that the most serious offenders would be excluded. That was always untrue, because the criterion for this—the use of an extended determinate sentence—was never a criterion related to the seriousness or type of offence. During the passage of the Sentencing Act, I told the Government that every year, more than 60% of rapists and 90% of child groomers receive standard determinate sentences, and would therefore not be excluded and could be released early, but they did not listen. Instead, they sent Ministers on to the airwaves to say that it was not true. Now, finally, after victims themselves have been written to, the Government can no longer escape from what they have done.

Those victims include Fiona Goddard, who went public in sharing her letter last week. Live on “Good Morning Britain”, after explaining what her perpetrators had done to her—about the rapes and sexual assaults that she suffered—she was told the Government line: that they had excluded the most dangerous offenders. Susanna Reid, who was interviewing her, saw immediately how insulting to Fiona that response was, saying that it did not address anything that she had been saying. Fiona said that it was

“actually quite offensive, because they are basically trying to say that sexual crimes against children aren’t some of the most serious.”

She is right, isn’t she? How can anyone justify an early release programme that includes rapists and child sexual predators by saying it excludes the most dangerous offenders?

The use of the word “dangerous” is in itself a deceitful change in terminology. Up until last week, the Government said that the programme would exclude the most serious offenders, despite, as I have said, me telling them repeatedly that this definition was not aligned to the sentences they were excluding. Finally, just weeks before serious criminals will be let out, they have realised that they were wrong—not that “dangerous” is any better than “most serious” if, either way, rapists are included and are being released early.

We know that more than 7,000 victims have been written to; we know that many more are not registered for updates and will not be told. But how many perpetrators are getting out, and what offences have they committed? We do not know. We have an idea. We know that every year, as I mentioned, more than 5,000 rapists, paedophiles, child groomers and seriously violent offenders are sent to prison on a standard determinate sentence. That is every year—we can therefore assume that thousands of such offenders are in prison at any one time.

The Government are today happy to present to us their estimates on their spending on the prison population and prison building, but they will not and cannot tell us how many of those offenders they will be letting out.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

As my hon. Friend and the House will know, the reoffending rate is around 50%. Given the numbers he has just announced, it is inevitable that serious crimes will be committed. If the Government are committed to this policy, which I hope they are not, and want to release people early, which I do not agree with, they should not release these serious criminals. They should instead release the less serious criminals.