The British government has issued a statement saying Prime Minister Andy Burnham has asked the justice secretary to work through further options to keep a greater number of the most serious offenders in prison, including the killers of murdered police officer PC Andrew Harper. The announcement, made on Monday evening, comes as an early release scheme designed to ease pressure on overcrowded jails is due to come into effect in October. Sky News described the move as a considerable toughening of the government's line on prisoner releases, and one that could shape how the scheme is applied when it begins.
The statement was notable above all for its timing, arriving only hours after the prime minister's own spokesperson had struck a very different note. Earlier in the day the spokesperson told journalists that it was not possible for the government to exempt the two men convicted of the manslaughter of the Thames Valley police officer from the early release scheme. By the evening, the position had shifted, with the government now saying the prime minister wanted his justice secretary to find a way to hold more of the most serious offenders, the Harper case among them, behind bars.
The reversal followed intense public pressure over the prospect of the two men being freed early. There had been a widespread public outcry, and an emotional campaign led by PC Harper's wife and his mother, who have pressed the government not to allow the killers out ahead of schedule. That campaign was accompanied by a petition that has been signed by around 900,000 people, a scale of response that has kept the case near the top of the political agenda and left ministers under sustained pressure to act.
The controversy has its roots in a review Burnham commissioned into the early release policy inherited from the previous administration under Keir Starmer, a policy drawn up to try to deal with severe overcrowding in the prison system. When the prime minister announced the results of that review last week, he said only those convicted of rape and the most serious child sexual offences would be excluded from early release. He explicitly stated that it was not possible to go any further, which meant that Albert Bowers and Jesse Cole, the two killers of PC Harper, would not be excluded, and he warned that widening the exemptions any further could lead to the entire prison system collapsing under the weight of overcrowding.
The government's messaging then appeared to harden over the course of a single day. On Monday the prime minister's official spokesperson maintained that it was not possible to exempt one or two individual offenders within a wider group, while indicating that ministers were nonetheless pushing for a broader solution. In a story first reported on the front page of The Times, Burnham was said to be increasingly confident that a solution could be found, and to have never accepted that he would be forced to choose between the perpetrators of rape, of grooming and of the killing of police officers.
Even with that stated confidence, it remains far from clear exactly how the government could keep the Harper killers and others locked up without unpicking the wider scheme. Officials have warned about the difficulties attached to each of the potential options. One possibility would be to exclude everyone convicted of manslaughter from the early release scheme altogether, but that would cover around 1,900 people and would therefore have a significant impact on the overall plan to reduce overcrowding, which is the very problem the early release policy was created to address.
The episode has left the new government trying to balance two competing pressures: the depth of public anger over the possible early release of men who killed a serving police officer, and the practical reality of a prison estate so full that ministers say it is at risk of collapse. With the scheme due to take effect in October, attention will now turn to whether the justice secretary can devise an approach that keeps the most serious offenders inside without triggering the very overcrowding crisis the early release policy was meant to relieve.