Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners have been released from prison early in error since 5 July 2024.

Releases in error have been increasing for several years and are another symptom of the prison system crisis inherited by this Government.

While the overwhelming majority of offenders are released correctly, we are clamping down on those releases in error that do occur. As the Deputy Prime Minister set out to the House, immediate measures have been introduced to strengthen release checks across prisons – making them the strongest release checks to ever be in place.

We have gripped this chaos – by building more prison places, ending the last Government’s early release scheme, being transparent with the public, immediately making changes to sentences to ease pressure on the system and, now, taking landmark reforms through our Sentencing Bill to make sure that prisons never run out of places again.

Annual totals for releases in error are published each July in the HMPPS Annual Digest, available via Prison and Probation Performance Statistics - GOV.UK, and provide data up to March 2025.

The total number of releases in error from 5 July 2024 to 31 March 2025 is 193.

The number of people who have been released in error since April 2025 cannot be provided because it would form a subset of releases in error data which underpins future versions of these Official Statistics.