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'Completely unacceptable' that mistaken prisoner releases have gone up under Labour, minister says
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics.
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has vowed that Labour is going to “grip” the prison crisis as the government continues to come under pressure after a number of high-profile cases of prisoners being wrongly released.
Speaking to Sky News’ Trevor Phillips this morning, Nandy confirmed that four wrongly released prisoners are still at large.
She said it was a “completely unacceptable” situation where an average of 22 people are wrongly released from prisons each month in England and Wales, a rise from an average of 17 wrong releases under a large period over the previous administration.
Nandy said the “antiquated” paper-based system within the Prison Service partly explained the wrongful releases and said Labour inherited a broken prison system – which was nearly full to capacity – when Keir Starmer won the general election last year.
Nandy told Sky News:
What I can tell you is that under the last government, for quite some time, there were, on average, 17 wrong releases.
Under this government that has risen. It’s 22 – that is completely unacceptable. It was unacceptable before, it’s unacceptable now.
Even one is too many, and the justice secretary is gripping this by appointing Dame Lynne Owens, who is the former director of the National Crime Agency, to make sure that we really grip this, starting with the antiquated paper-based system that was developed in the 1980s that is still being used; building new prisons; and making sure that we have additional checks so that people aren’t wrongly released.
The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) has called for an “entire overhaul” of the sentencing calculation and discharging process and has warned the justice secretary, David Lammy, not to seek to blame individual officers for systemic failures.
Stay with us as we give you the latest developments in UK politics.
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Nandy says there were a series of 'very serious allegations' made about the BBC
MPs have said the BBC had “serious questions to answer” about the way a speech by the US president, Donald Trump, was edited by a BBC Panorama documentary.
The concerns regard clips spliced together from sections of the US president’s speech on January 6 2021 to make it appear he told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to “fight like hell” in the documentary Trump: A Second Chance? which was broadcast by the BBC the week before last year’s US election.
On her Sunday morning politics programme, Laura Kuenssberg asked the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, if the editing was misleading. Nandy said she watched the programme but not the “full version of the interview versus the clips that the Panorama programme showed”.
She continued:
I have discussed the range of issues that were raised in the email that was leaked to the BBC. It isn’t just about the Panorama programme, although that is incredibly serious.
There are a series of very serious allegations made, the most serious of which is that there is systemic bias in the way that difficult issues are reported at the BBC.
I’ve spoken to the chairman (Samir Shah) this week. I am confident that he is treating this with the seriousness that that demands, and I understand he will be reporting back to the select committee on Monday.
Concerns about the Trump editing were raised in a memo by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee (EGSC). He left the role in the summer.
The dossier, first reported by the Telegraph, said the programme made Trump “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” by cutting together footage.
The Telegraph has also reportedly said that Prescott has alleged there were “systemic problems”, which had not been addressed by senior management, claiming there were “stark differences” between the coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza on BBC Arabic and on the main BBC website.
The Guardian’s senior political correspondent, Peter Walker, provides some context behind the erroneous prison releases in this useful analysis piece which zooms in on HMP Wandsworth, the category B jail in south London cast into the headlines once again after the mistaken release of two prisoners in a week. Here is an extract:
Supposed to hold no more than 963 men, Wandsworth generally has about 1,500 kept in cramped and often dirty conditions, at times locked in cells for 22 hours a day.
Adding to the chaos is the transient status of many of the prisoners. According to another report on the jail, published this month by one of the independent monitoring boards that go into prisons to look at conditions, only 15% of Wandsworth’s inmates were serving sentences, with the rest either on remand, convicted but not yet sentenced, recalled to prison, or immigration cases.
Presiding over all this are about 85 staff, and often fewer. According to Taylor’s report, a combination of sickness and training commitments meant that at any one time a third of prison staff were not on frontline duties.
Those who were on the prison wings would generally be inexperienced. Across the prison service in England and Wales, every year about one in seven junior prison staff leave, and for senior officers the departure rate is one in eight.
At Wandsworth, Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, found that this mass of inexperienced prison officers made implementing change difficult. “Staff were not wilfully neglectful, they simply did not understand their role and they lacked direction, training and consistent support from leaders,” he wrote.
David Lammy’s refusal to confirm whether any more asylum seekers had been wrongly released since Hadush Kebatu (a convicted child sex offender who arrived in the UK in a small boat and was mistakenly released from prison in October) at prime minister’s questions was a “profound mistake”, the shadow defence secretary told Sky News.
James Cartlidge said:
All I knew was we had a tip-off there was another such case, we didn’t know for certain.
You can’t know for certain unless you’re running the department and he stood up and answered my questions.
He had at his fingertips the facts and he’s in front of parliament, he has a Ministerial Code to be transparent, and he didn’t answer the questions at all.
And my judgment is that was a profound mistake and a discourtesy to parliament, notwithstanding what it means for his adherence to the ministerial code.
Cartlidge added: “I didn’t say he misled the House – he didn’t answer question at all.”
In her interview with Sky News, Lisa Nandy rejected suggestions that the under-pressure justice secretary David Lammy had been “evasive” in his handling of the news a prisoner was wrongly released from HMP Wandsworth, saying he had been “weighing up in his mind” what information to share.
Asked whether his evasiveness made it more difficult to trust ministers on the issue, the culture secretary said:
I don’t accept that he was being evasive. I was in the House of Commons chamber, I was there, I was sitting next to the home secretary, and I could see that he was weighing up in his mind what information to release.
He was asked about an asylum seeker. The case in question was not an asylum seeker.
And I think all of us as ministers have an obligation to make sure that when we do speak about matters of such significance to the public and put information into the public domain, that we do that with care and make sure that the full facts are presented.
Lammy has faced scrutiny over his handling of the mistaken release of Brahim Kaddour-Cherif after he refused to answer questions put to him on the issue in the Commons on Wednesday.
On Thursday he insisted that parliament had not been misled. “I took the judgment that it is important when updating the house and the country about serious matters like this that you have all of the detail,” he said.
Kaddour-Cherif, 24, from Algeria, was accidentally freed on 29 October from Wandsworth prison in south London. He was arrested in Finsbury Park, north London, on Friday after police said they had received a call from a member of the public.
'Completely unacceptable' that mistaken prisoner releases have gone up under Labour, minister says
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics.
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has vowed that Labour is going to “grip” the prison crisis as the government continues to come under pressure after a number of high-profile cases of prisoners being wrongly released.
Speaking to Sky News’ Trevor Phillips this morning, Nandy confirmed that four wrongly released prisoners are still at large.
She said it was a “completely unacceptable” situation where an average of 22 people are wrongly released from prisons each month in England and Wales, a rise from an average of 17 wrong releases under a large period over the previous administration.
Nandy said the “antiquated” paper-based system within the Prison Service partly explained the wrongful releases and said Labour inherited a broken prison system – which was nearly full to capacity – when Keir Starmer won the general election last year.
Nandy told Sky News:
What I can tell you is that under the last government, for quite some time, there were, on average, 17 wrong releases.
Under this government that has risen. It’s 22 – that is completely unacceptable. It was unacceptable before, it’s unacceptable now.
Even one is too many, and the justice secretary is gripping this by appointing Dame Lynne Owens, who is the former director of the National Crime Agency, to make sure that we really grip this, starting with the antiquated paper-based system that was developed in the 1980s that is still being used; building new prisons; and making sure that we have additional checks so that people aren’t wrongly released.
The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) has called for an “entire overhaul” of the sentencing calculation and discharging process and has warned the justice secretary, David Lammy, not to seek to blame individual officers for systemic failures.
Stay with us as we give you the latest developments in UK politics.
