Accidental Prison Releases

Lord Sandhurst Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. The checklists that we have made more robust are the same checklists across all prisons, but the number of releases per prison varies dramatically. HMP Gartree averages two releases a year, whereas, as I previously said, in Wandsworth it is 2,000. That is why the digital team last week went into HMP Wandsworth, to look at opportunities for some quick fixes to embrace digital technology.

The AI team went in and, to give a couple of examples, they thought that an AI chatbot would be really helpful, along with a cross-referencing for aliases, because we know some offenders have more than 20 aliases. We have given the team the green light to get on with examples like that.

The noble Lord is exactly right that this is about how we deal with this information, and how we make sure it is accurate when we are dealing with often very complex people in a very complex situation.

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

Further to that answer, can the Minister confirm how many prisons still rely on manual, rather than digital, release date calculations, why that is so and what plans there are to move to a digital system?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The process is a mixture of paperwork and computers and digital. In an offender management unit, there are literally boxes and boxes of paperwork, all over desks and on the floor, that follow offenders around the various prisons that they go to.

My and the team’s solution is very much digitally based, but we need to make sure we link that across the whole justice system, and the Home Office as well, because a number of the errors can be caused not just in the prison but in the courts too. So, longer term, it has got to be right that we look at a digital solution across the whole justice sector.