No 10 says Starmer ‘shares public anger’ at early prisoner releases but system facing paralysis without it – UK politics live | Politics

Mahmood ended her statement by saying she said she would accelerate the deportation of foreign offenders.

I share the public’s view that with 10,000 in our prisons, there are far too many foreign offenders in this country, costing £50,000 pounds a year, each to house at His Majesty’s pleasure.

It happens to be my personal view that deportation is as good a punishment as imprisonment, if not better.

We are currently on track to remove more foreign national offenders this year than at any time in recent years, but I will now be working with my colleagues across government to explore the ways that we can accelerate this further, including working with the Home Office to make the early removal scheme for foreign offenders more effective.

Mahmood said the early release scheme already implemented by Labour would solve the overcrowding crisis for about a year. But “after the summer of disorder, the next crisis could be just nine months away”, she said.

She said she had already given magistrates new sentencing powers, to reduce the pressure on remand prisons where overcrowding is most accute.

But she said she needed to go further.

She said she would be increasing the maximum period offenders can spend on home detention curfew from six months to 12 months.

She also said she would be review the risk-assessed recall review process, so that when offenders get returned to jail after a breach of their parole conditions, it will be more straightforward to clear them for release again.

UPDATE: Mahmood said:

The second measure that we will introduce will address the soaring recall population, which has doubled from 6,000 to 12,000 in just six years.

Risk-assessed recall review is a power of the secretary of state to re-release unlicensed those who pose a low list to the public, avoiding the long waits that they often face for a parole board hearing. In recent years, its use has fallen to as low as 92 times in 2022.

Later this month, I intend to review the ris- assessed recall review process so that lower risk cases can be considered for re-release after they have been recalled to prison for two to three months, where their further detention is no longer necessary to protect the public.

And I should note that this will only change the cases that can be considered for release, with the final decision still in the hands of experienced probation officers and managers.

Mahmood said the sentencing review would be governed by three principles.

First, sentences must “punish offenders and protect the public”, she said. She suggested in some cases longer sentences might be preferable.

For dangerous offenders, prison will always remain the answer punishment and public protection will be this government’s first priority. There will also be some offenders who I will task the review with considering, like prolific offenders – who are just one in every 10 individuals, but nearly half of all sentences.

Some of these are hyper-prolific offenders committing hundreds of crimes. And I will ask the reviewers to consider whether a longer sentence might punish them better and force them to engage with rehabilitation on the inside.

Second, the review would look at what could be done to encourage more rehabilitation.

We need both sticks and carrots in this I will be encouraging the reviewers to learn from others who have succeeded.

In Texas, for instance, Republican legislators were faced by a problem similar to ours, a soaring prison population, sky-high reoffending rates and prisons that had run out of space.

Working across political divide, the Texans introduced a system of good behavior credits, where well-behaved prisoners could earn time off their sentence by engaging in rehabilitation programs. The results were remarkable. Crime fell by nearly a third, reaching the lowest levels in half a century. The prison population fell by over 20,000 and after two decades, the Texans had closed 16 prisons rather than building new ones.

Third, the review would have to “expand the punishment that offenders receive outside of prison”, Mahmood said.

There are already ways that we severely constrain offenders, limiting their freedom outside of prison. Those under home detention curfews are in practice under a form of house arrest with a tag on their ankle and a censor in their home. They are placed on the curfews, generally for 12 hours each day. Should they break that curfew, they can be picked up and if need be locked up.

In some ways, punishment outside a prison can be even more restrictive than prison. It is a sad fact that in many of our prisons today a drinker can all too easily procure a drink.

On a sobriety tag, however, with their sweat measured every 30 minutes and a 97% compliance rate their teetotalism is almost as strict as mine …

I will be inviting the reviewers to consider the technology that they have available to them now, and also the next frontier of technology used in other countries, but not yet in ours, because I believe that the modern world presents us with the opportunity to build a prison outside of prison, where the eyes of the state follow a prisoner more closely than any prison officer can.

In the Commons Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is making her statement to MPs on the sentencing review.

She says the prison overcrowding crisis was great disgrace of the last government. She says they left the system “on the point of collapse”, with prisons close to the point where they would have to stop taking new inmates, trials would have to be cancelled and the police would have to stop arresting people.

During the Commons statement on the new loan to Ukraine, John Healey, the defence secretary, said the deployment of troops from North Korea in support of Russia was “shocking”. He said:

In a concerning new development is it is now highly likely that the transfer of hundreds of combat troops from North Korea to Russia has begun. North Korean soldiers supporting Russia’s war of aggression on European soil. It is as shocking as it is desperate.

North Korea already sends significant munitions and arms to Russia in direct violation of multiple UN resolutions. This developing military cooperation between Russia and the DPRK has serious security implications for Europe and for the Indo Pacific.

It represents a wider, growing alliance of aggression which Nato and the G7 nations must confront.

John Healey, the defence secretary, has told MPs that the government is lending Ukraine an additional £2.26bn which it can use to buy weapons for use to fight off the Russian invastion. Dan Sabbagh has details of the announcement here.

In the Commons, Healey said the loan would be funded using profits from Russian assets that have been sanctioned, and that it would be on top of the £3bn a year the UK is already giving Ukraine. He said:

Loans which will be repaid using the profits generated from immobilised Russian sovereign assets. Profits on frozen Russian money supporting Ukraine’s fight against [Vladimir] Putin, turning the proceeds of Putin’s corrupt regime against that regime and putting it in the hands of Ukrainians.

I want to be clear, today’s new money is additional to the £3bn a year of military support this government has committed to Ukraine each year for as long as it takes, in addition to the £3.5bnn defence industrial support treaty, which I signed with Defence Minister Umerov in July, money that will be used by Ukraine to procure military equipment from British companies, boosting our British jobs and our British industry.

And extra too, the additional artillery, air defences, ammunition, missiles that we have announced and delivered in the first four months of this new government.

Ukraine is a first order priority for me as defence secretary. It’s a first order priority for this government. We will continue to step up support.

On the Today programme this morning Kirsty Buchanan, who worked as a Tory special adviser in the Ministry of Justice and Downing Street under the last government, rejected the claim that prison numbers have gone up drastically over the last 30 years because of a sentencing “arms race” by politicians. This is the charge made by David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary who is leading a review of sentencing policy for Labour. (See 9.26am.) But Buchanan, who was a MoJ adviser when Liz Truss was justice secretary, said:

When we were [at the MoJ] we took a deep dive into what the greatest drivers for prison growth were. And people may be reassured to know that this isn’t that we’re just locking up more people and throwing away the key.

The greatest driver since the 1990s isn’t a tit for tat arms race among politicians desperate to be seen to be tougher on crime than the next person.

The greatest drivers are an increase in reporting and convictions to serious sexual offenses. So that’s rape, domestic violence, rape of a minor, and robbery. They’re all violent crimes.

And, actually, we are sentencing more people for those, and we are sentencing them for longer.

The prison population itself has remained relatively stable since about 2010, around 85,000. But [since] the 1990s the huge surge, that extra 20,000 people that we send to prison, I think we can all agree they really need to be there. They are very serious offenders.

Keir Starmer “shares the public’s anger” at the sight of prisoners being released early today, Downing Street said this morning. But the last government is to blame, the prime minister’s spokesperson suggested, because without the early release scheme there would be “complete paralysis” of the criminal justice system.

Commenting on the latest batch of early prisoner releases, the spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing this morning:

The prime minister shares the public’s anger at these scenes and thinks it is shocking that any government should ever inherit the crisis that this government has when it comes to our prisons.

But just to be clear, there was no choice not to act. If we had not acted, we would have faced a complete paralysis of the system.

Courts unable to send offenders to prison, police unable to make arrests and unchecked criminality on our streets, so the government clearly could not allow this to happen.

Voters will judge the Labour government to be a failure if it keeps its promises to be responsible on government borrowing and tax, but fails to improve public services, according to polling research published today.

The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published a very detailed report exploring what voters say about how they would assess the record of the Labour government in 2029, depending on what it has achieved by then.

The results suggest that voters care a lot more about seeing NHS waiting lists halved, public services getting better and infrastracture improved than they do about government borrowing and debt coming down, or taxes not going up.

This is particularly the case with people who switched to Labour at the last election.

And people would even be happy to see Labour break its promise on national insurance if NHS waiting lists halved as a result, the polling suggests.

The IPPR says in its summary:

We found that Labour government which is perceived to have delivered on its ‘tax, borrowing and spending promises’ but failed to deliver change in public services will be judged a failure and punished by voters. This is especially crucial for voters who switched to Labour in 2024. Among general election 2024 switchers to Labour, a scenario in which government debt and deficits have been reduced but NHS waiting lists are unchanged leads to a government approval rating of -12, a fall of 28 percentage points from current approval ratings with switchers.

Instead, the public prefer the government to borrow more, find additional tax revenues (within their rules) and deliver on change – with a particular focus on public services. A scenario where waiting lists are halved – even at the expense of debt or taxes rising – leads to a +31 approval rating with this group, 15 percentage points higher than now. Similar results are found seen for Conservative to Labour switchers.

Steve Akehurst from Persuasion UK, a research company that worked with the IPPR on the report, said:

It’s clear from this research that voters will not reward Labour simply for being good stewards of the economy. The public wants to see tangible improvements in essential services. Key parts of Labour’s coalition do not necessarily like the idea of higher borrowing or tax, but they seem willing to forgive it as the price of improved services.