Prisoner Release Checks

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

Dear, oh dear, where to begin? This Justice Secretary could not deport the only small boat migrant who wanted—no, who tried—to be deported. Having been mistakenly released, Hadush Kebatu came back to prison asking to be deported not once, not twice, but five times, but he was turned away. The only illegal migrants this Government are stopping are those who actually want to leave the UK. His officials, briefing the press, called it “the mother of all—”. Yeah, they are not wrong, are they? Calamity Lammy strikes again. It is a national embarrassment.

Today the Justice Secretary feigns anger at what has happened. He says he is “livid” that Kebatu was mistakenly let out, but under his plans to abolish short prison sentences, which he forced through the Commons last week, Kebatu would never have even stepped foot in prison in the first place. Let us get it straight: we had the spectacle of the Metropolitan police scouring London to find a man the Justice Secretary is simultaneously legislating to avoid sending to prison. What an absolute farce! I must commend the Justice Secretary’s performance: it is truly BAFTA-worthy. He has perfected the art of performative outrage to a tee.

On Wednesday—[Interruption.] They may be laughing, but let me finish this point. On Wednesday, the Justice Secretary will force every one of his MPs to vote again on the Sentencing Bill, which will see hundreds of sex offenders just like Kebatu avoid prison altogether—sick men who destroy the lives of young girls, who steal their childhoods from them. They will be free to roam your communities to steal the childhoods of your constituents. I will tell you who will be livid then: the British public will be livid and they will know who is to blame.

The Justice Secretary says he has launched an inquiry into what has happened, but he should be able to provide some basic questions to the House now. With respect to the prison in question, HMP Chelmsford, there is clearly a very significant problem. In a previous internal audit at Chelmsford, officials had marked their own homework as “good”, yet inspectors rated it as of “serious concern”. What is the Justice Secretary going to do now to address the way in which problems in our prisons are covered up routinely or wished away?

On the inquiry itself, you will not be surprised to hear that I am—how shall I put this?—sceptical about this Government’s ability to conduct inquiries with any competence. Why are they limiting themselves to this particular security farce and not the other glaring errors, such as the doubling of drone sightings above prisons, the soaring assaults on prison officers or the rampant extremism we are now seeing in our jails?

Shocking as this accidental release is, it is not a one-off blunder. It has come to be the norm under this Government, as the number of prisoners mistakenly let out early has more than doubled. Will the Justice Secretary tell the House how many of the 262 prisoners let out mistakenly in the year to March were violent or sexual offenders? And how many are still at large? There are now record numbers of foreign nationals clogging up our prisons—more than under the last Government. How many of those 262 prisoners accidentally released are migrants, like Kebatu, who were awaiting deportation?

Can the Justice Secretary give the House his cast-iron assurance that this man will be deported from our country by the end of the week, as he promised on the news on Sunday? If he fails, will he take responsibility and resign? Lastly, on Tuesday the Justice Secretary blocked my amendment to release the migrant crime data. Does he now finally acknowledge that there is a link between the small boats and crime in this country? Will he call the small boats out for what they are: a national security emergency?

This man should never have been in our country in the first place. That is the truth. He should have been detained. He should have been deported. Instead, he was put up in a hotel in Epping and allowed to prey on schoolgirls. Now we learn that some Labour officials privately concede that they were wrong to scrap the Rwanda plan. Be in no doubt: from start to finish, the Kebatu fiasco was a creation entirely of Labour’s own making. So, I say to the Justice Secretary, there is no point coming to the House today professing to be livid at the consequences of your own policies. The British people, they can see straight through you.

[Mr Lammy]

This is a serious issue and that is why there will be a full independent investigation.

The shadow Justice Secretary—I will give him this—is smooth. But as my mother would have said, if he was chocolate he would lick himself. He should hang his head in shame. The crisis in our prisons that we face today is because of 14 years of failure under his Government. As they were packing their bags to leave office—he knows this—there were temporary release failures under his watch. They presided over 17 mistaken releases per month.

This did not happen overnight, and it was not inevitable; it was due to the choices made by the right hon. Gentleman’s party over 14 years of chaos. The Conservatives said that they were the Government of security and safety, but again and again they oversaw rising instances of violent crime and crumbling courts and prisons. They promised 20,000 extra prison places, and they managed only an extra 500—500 in 14 years. They promised to remove more foreign national offenders from our prisons, and they failed. They promised investment and expansion in the prison system, but budgets stalled. They promised investment in the police, but we saw police numbers cut by 20,000. They promised increases in access to justice, but we did not see that; instead, we saw almost the collapse of legal aid. Under the right hon. Gentleman’s watch, violence, self-harm and drug abuse went up in our prisons while prison officer numbers were cut, yet he has the brass neck to come here and give the impression that this problem started just 14 months ago.

Let me just pause there. William Fernandez, a sexual predator, was released in error in March 2021. After he was let out of prison, he raped a 16-year-old and sexually assaulted another young woman. Was there an independent investigation? No, not from the Conservatives. When Rayon Newby, another man who was mistakenly released from a category B prison, was released in error in March 2023, was there an independent investigation under the right hon. Gentleman’s watch? No, there was not. When Lauras Matiusovas was released in error in December 2021, was there any independent investigation? There was none at all. The right hon. Gentleman has some brass neck.

I have asked Lynne Owens to look at this incident and to do so in eight weeks, and we will of course come back to the House when that is done. All of what the right hon. Gentleman has said—looking at what happened over this period of time—will be subject to that review.

The right hon. Gentleman also says that the sentencing review will let out more foreign nationals, but he is wrong. We have actually brought down the threshold, so that someone can now be deported with just a suspended sentence. He knows that. If he reads clause 42 of the Sentencing Bill, he will understand that properly.