02. May 2025

Justice system failures: Responsibility lies with Lammy amid repeated wrongful prisoner releases

Last week, after a migrant sex offender was mistakenly released from prison, Justice Secretary David Lammy announced he was implementing the “strongest release checks that have ever been in place”. However, since then, details have emerged of two additional cases of wrongful prisoner releases.

It is always risky for a government when it clearly lacks control over an issue voters would reasonably expect it to manage effectively. A prominent recent example of this has been the arrival of migrants on small boats.

From Rishi Sunak’s promise to “stop the boats” to Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to “smash the gangs”, both have fallen short, and the problem remains substantial. Now the government faces another crisis: a justice system that is visibly, transparently and repeatedly failing – and where measures designed to address accidental prisoner releases are not working.

According to government figures published in July, 262 prisoners were released in error in the year to March 2025 – a 128% rise compared to the 115 cases recorded in the preceding 12 months. In other words, this has been a longstanding problem, and it is getting worse.

Context is crucial in politics: this controversy comes after the mistaken release of perhaps the most high-profile prisoner jailed this year. Hadush Kebatu, who arrived in the UK on a small boat, was imprisoned after sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman while living in an asylum hotel in Epping, Essex, only to be accidentally freed. He has since been deported.

This gave the issue of wrongful prison releases a prominence it had not previously enjoyed. Once again, we are seeing ministers use language typically employed by opposition politicians.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has described the number of people arriving on small boats as “shameful”. Now, Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy is saying he is “absolutely outraged” over the mistaken release a week ago of Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, a 24-year-old Algerian sex offender.

Lammy added that his officials have been “working through the night to take him back to prison.”

This brings us to the messy origins of this saga, during B-Team Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday lunchtime. With the prime minister at the COP climate summit in Brazil, it was his deputy who was answering questions.

Wandsworth prison manhunt: What we know about mistakenly released inmates

Police hunt for two prisoners wrongly released from Wandsworth in past week

Two men mistakenly released from London prison

The Conservatives put forward shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge, who repeated a question using very specific wording over and over again. He wanted to know if an “asylum-seeking offender had been accidentally released from prison”.

It was obvious from the Press Gallery that Cartlidge was onto something – due to the precision of his language and his constant repetition of the question. But Lammy chose to repeatedly avoid answering, despite later revelations that he was aware of the case Cartlidge was referring to.

So why didn’t he address it? It turns out Cartlidge had his facts wrong – Kaddour-Cherif is not an asylum seeker. He arrived in the UK legally but overstayed his visa.

Lammy was unsure when entering the chamber whether Kaddour-Cherif was an asylum seeker or not. So setting out what he knew might have also exposed what he didn’t.

His team insists “it is incredibly important to know the facts” and argues it was initially the police’s responsibility to disclose details publicly. Really? It seems reasonable to ask both whether Lammy could or should have known more when he entered the chamber and whether he could or should have shared more while he was there.

The Conservatives later called for him to return to the Commons to clarify what he knew. Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith suggested he may have misled the Commons. The Liberal Democrats and Reform have also been highly critical.

Some also argue Lammy’s demeanor – including shouting “get a grip, man!” at Cartlidge – was a mistake. Could he instead have chosen to outline what he did and didn’t know about the case at the start of the exchanges, before taking any questions?

But the bigger picture is what truly matters: the justice system is currently repeatedly failing in its most basic task – determining who should be in prison and who shouldn’t.

The reasons for this are complex – with difficult questions for the courts, individual prisons, the Prison Service, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. It is not a new problem, but it is a growing one, and the government does not have a handle on it. And that, if you are the justice secretary, is a major issue.

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