Justice Secretary Alex Norris has said that there would be no prison places available by “October or November” without the government’s early release scheme.
He told GB News: “When we came to government, we were in a situation where we were days away from prison places running out. That means nobody getting arrested. That means people being bailed back home, even after serious offences.
“We are building lots of prison places, 14,000 over the next few years. But we’ve made important changes through the Sentencing Act to make sure we don’t run out of prison places. Without these changes, we run out of prison places in October or November of this year.
“Now, we, me as the new Justice Secretary, Andy Burnham, as a new Prime Minister, have heard the concerns around some of the people possibly involved in this. We have paused it and we’ve looked again. We have been able to, as you have said, remove rapists, to remove child sex abusers from scope of the release from prison.
“However, we would like to have gone further, but we can’t. This is as far as we can go and still have prison places. And I know that’s very disappointing and upsetting to victims and their families. But it’s the best we could manage at this time.”
On the release of two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper, he added: “People are angry, and most importantly, the victims and the families are angry about some of these changes. Part of the challenge here is the nature of what they were convicted for. One of the individuals, the driver, is not in scope because of the nature of his sentence.
“However, the other two who were convicted of manslaughter are in scope because of the nature of their sentence. At the time, there was a lot of concern around whether the powers and whether the sentences available to judges are strong enough. That’s why we’ve changed the law, so that now an individual who causes the loss of life of an emergency service worker would be subject to a life sentence.
“So that has changed, but granted, it does not impact in this case. To answer your question on whether we could find an individual way, there simply isn’t one. We can only work on offence type, and in this case, we have to look at manslaughter as a whole. We’ve been able to, as I say, remove rape and to remove child sex abusers, but we’ve not been able to remove manslaughter.”
