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

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.

Last week Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and Kemi Badenoch ally, said that Robert Jenrick would not be ideal as party leader because he looked like a “Tory boy”.

In an interview with BBC Breakfast this morning, Jenrick hit back. As the Mirror reports, when asked about the jibe, Jenrick said:

Well, the last person I would take advice from in a leadership contest I think is Michael Gove … I don’t know what [Tory boy] really means … I didn’t come from a traditional Conservative background.

Neither of my parents were card carrying members of the Conservative party … I don’t consider myself to be a ‘Tory boy.’ I want the Conservative party to be the trade union of working people right across this country.

Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary, has put a post on social media explaining why she is backing Robert Jenrick for party leader.

I’m supporting @RobertJenrick to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.

We need to rebuild trust on one of the defining issues of our age: the global migration crisis.

Robert’s unequivocal commitment to leaving the ECHR and placing a cap on visas is how we start.

In a separate development, William Hague, a former leader of the party, has used his Times column to say, “after hesitating for a while”, he has decided to back Kemi Badenoch. He explains:

While Jenrick has set out a series of very specific commitments, most notably on immigration and leaving the European convention on human rights, Badenoch has rightly resisted the pressure to do so. She seems to know instinctively what I wish I had worked out before I became opposition leader in 1997: that before voters will pay any attention to the policies you announce, they need to understand your values.

Badenoch’s insistence that principles rather than policies are the starting point for political revival is correct. It is borne out by the experience of the more successful opposition leaders in recent history, from Churchill to Thatcher. Her chosen values of truth, personal responsibility, active citizenship, equality under the law and family – in the broadest, modern sense of family – are strong foundations on which to rethink policies over several years. And her emphatic view that the processes of government need to be re-engineered to achieve anything significant is also spot on. Add in her pugnacious personality and it is possible to discern the combination of values and energy that could yet lift the Conservative party up from the electoral floor.

The Treasury has said it will need to take difficult decisions in next week’s budget after higher debt interest payments and pay awards for public sector workers pushed government borrowing to £16.6bn last month – the third highest September figure on record, Larry Elliott reports.

As Pippa Crerar reports, yesterday it emerged that Suella Braverman forwarded government documents to her private email accounts at least 127 times while serving as attorney general, in a potential breach of the ministerial code.

This morning, in an interview with LBC, the former home secretary and former attorney general said that what she did was “not particularly unusual” and that there was a “tedious” explanation for it. She said she was not transferring “sensitive” material to her private email account and that she only emailed government documents to that account because she wanted to use two laptops at the same time when working from home during Covid.

Braverman said that, as a minister, she was not allowed to use her government email account on her personal laptop. She had to use her government email on her ministerial laptop. She said that she was allowed to take her ministerial laptop home, but that during Covid, when she was working at home a lot, she wanted to have two screens on the go at the same time.

When the presenter, Nick Ferrari, asked her why she did not just use her ministerial laptop, Braverman replied:

But that’s not very practical when you are reading a lot of documents online and you simultaneously need to write lengthy documents and pieces as part of your work. Sometimes you need two screens.

So it’s a bit tedious as an explanation. There’s nothing to do with spies or state secrets here … There was nothing sensitive that was transferred.

It was literally a way to enable me to view documents on one screen and simultaneously type on another screen so that I could explain my views those people.

Ferrari did not ask Braverman why she could not just use a split screen function on her laptop.

Asked if she would do it again, Braverman replied:

Listen, I was never actually advised that that was not permissible, and we were in a strange scenario where a lot of that was done during Covid and lockdown, when there was a lot of working from home, and I wasn’t getting as many papers in physical copy.

And she claimed that what she did was not particularly unusual. Asked why other ministers did not also get into trouble for using personal email addresses for ministerial business, she said:

If you look back at the records, there have been some of my colleagues who have been found to be using their personal emails many years ago. I’m not going to name any names. But you can find that out as well. So it’s not particularly unusual, I would say, amongst ministers.

The revelation about Braverman forwarding government documents to her personal email account at least 127 times came out after an 18-month Freedom of Information Act inquiry from the Times newspaper resulted in a tribunal ordering disclosure of the information. The paper was particularly interested in Braverman’s record in this area because when she was home secretary under Liz Truss she was forced to resign because she forwarded an unpublished government document deemed sensitive to a backbench Tory MP.

In her LBC interview, Braverman also said she was backing Robert Jenrick for next Tory leader because he was committed to leaving the European convention on human rights.

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said that mistakes that affected the first set of early prisoner releases under Labour should have been “ironed out” ahead of the second round take place today.

In an interview with Times Radio, she said that 37 prisoners were released by mistake when around 1,700 inmates were released early in September. She went on:

All 37 were returned to custody, and that operational part of the system actually ended up working exactly as it should.

But those mistakes have now been ironed out, and I’m confident that the releases taking place will now be exactly as we need them to be, and victims who are required to be notified will be notified.

Mahmood also said that the rates of recall for prisoners released early were “broadly in line” with usual prison releases.

Speaking on LBC, she said:

We’ll do a statistics release in due course, as we normally would, on rates of recall and on reoffending in our prison estate.

What I can tell you is our early assessment is that the rates of recall and potential reoffending in the cohort that has been released as a result of the emergency release measures is broadly in line with what we would expect.

Good morning. Michael Howard was Conservative leader at one point, and was instrumental in ensuring that David Cameron succeeded him in that job, but perhaps he will be best remembered for his time as home secretary in the 1990s, when he gave a speech that summed up criminal justice policy for the next three decades. He told the Tory conference:

Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists – and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice … This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.

And, around that time, the prison population in England and Wales started to soar. The election of a Labour government did not make any difference to this trend; Howardism prevailed.

Today, is that all going to change? As Rajeev Syal reports in our overnight story, to coincide with the 1,100 more criminals being let out as part of the early release policy introduced by Labour to deal with the jail overcrowding crisis, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is announcing a review of sentencing policy, which will be carried out by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary. It will consider alternatives to sending people to jail.

The Ministry of Justice’s press release about the review is here. And the terms of refererence are here.

Mahmood has been giving interviews this morning and it has been notable that she has not been declaring war on the Michael Howard approach. The Ministry of Justice says that one of the principles behind the sentencing review is to “make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public” and it says the government is committed to creating 14,000 more prison places. Although the review will consider “tougher punishments outside of prison”, the terms of reference also imply sentences should go up for offences against women and girls.

On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson asked Mahmood to clarify how radical she was being. Did she just want to curb the rate at which the prison population was going up? Or did she want fewer people to be jailed, and Britain to stop being “the European leader in locking people up”? In her reply, Mahmood rather fudged it, implying she wanted both. She said:

Well, the problem is that the rate of increase is such that nobody can keep up with demand, and you risk running out of prison places … We reach critical capacity again by next summer. We cannot build our way out of this crisis.

To put it in context, I have HMP Birmingham in my constituency. That’s a very large, older Victorian prison. It has a capacity of over 1,000. We need to build nearly five of those every single year to keep up with demand. So we do have to manage demand into the prison system.

But for a period it’s obvious that demand is going to go up, because we are going to have to build those 14,000 places. If we don’t, we run out of prison places earlier than we would expect.

The crisis is so acute that all of these things, building more supply, dealing with demand, have to be part of the solution.

But in the end, the sentencing review is our best opportunity to set a new trajectory where we can manage that demand, where I can make sure we never run out of prison places again, where there is a prison place for everyone who needs to be locked up, and where we expand the range of punishments outside of prison.

But Gauke himself has been a bit more willing to denounce Howardism. He has written an article for the New Statesman about the sentencing review and he says he wants to use it to end the “sentencing bidding war” between political parties. He says:

For the last 30 years, there has been a sentencing bidding war between the political parties seeking to compete to be seen as the toughest on crime by promising ever-longer prison sentences. Rightly, the public expects criminality to be punished and prison is often viewed as the only effective means of punishment. But the capacity crisis in our prisons has meant that – at the very least – we have no choice but to pause the increase in the prison population. It is also sensible that we now look more broadly at the evidence and ask whether sentencing policy should be more fundamentally reformed. By next spring, we should have the answer.

There will be a lot more on this as the day goes on.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the sentencing review.

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