Rishi Sunak was warned before the election by the UK’s most senior police officers that failure to take immediate action to alleviate the prisons crisis would significantly increase risks to public safety.
The then-prime minister chose to park a decision on implementing early-release measures to tackle prison overcrowding until after the general election on 4 July, despite a separate warning from the Prison Governors' Association that the criminal justice system was on the “precipice of failure”.
In a letter on 27 June, police chiefs also urged Sunak to take “immediate action to begin to address this crisis and mitigate its worse impacts”, warning that “simply waiting for a new government to be formed after the election means an unacceptable delay in mitigation”.
Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; National Police Chief’s Council chair Gavin Stephens; and Rob Nixon, the NPCC’s lead for criminal justice, warned Sunak that failure to act before the election would increase the likelihood of police being unable to discharge their duties and public safety being compromised. The letter, shared by The Times’s home affairs editor Matt Dathan, said the threat to public safety would escalate “once criminals see an opportunity to exploit system vulnerability”.
The police chiefs told Sunak that delaying decisions had “already exacerbated those risks" and said further delays until after the general election would "increase the risks significantly”.
After Labour won the election, new justice secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that the government would implement the policy recommended by the police chiefs and other organisations to release some categories of prisoner after they have served 40% of their sentences to address the crisis.
Today, prisons began to release offenders under the scheme – known as standard determinate sentence 40, or SDS40 – having delayed its implementation to give prison governors, the probation service and resettlement and rehabilitation organisations time to prepare.
All prisoners who have committed sexual offences are excluded from the scheme, as well as those who have committed serious violence or terror offences, along with some offences connected to domestic abuse.
The police chiefs had said in the letter to Sunak that this policy was the “only credible option” and would take six-to-eight weeks to safely implement. They warned that “the lack of decisions now means that the job of preparing for the oncoming crisis is made significantly worse”.
Explaining the decision to implement the scheme, justice secretary Mahmood said: “We inherited a prison system on the point of collapse.
"This is not a change that we wanted to make. It was the only option on the table because the alternative would have seen the total collapse of the criminal justice system in this country.
"We would have seen the breakdown of law and order because courts would not have been able to conduct trials and the police would not have been able to make arrests and that’s not something that that I was prepared to sit back and allow to happen.”