Andy Burnham has signed off changes to the prisoner early release scheme that will keep rapists and serious child sex offenders in jail this fall. The changes were announced overnight, fifteen days after he entered No. 10, and they start with early releases due to begin in October.
Six thousand prisoners had been due to go free after serving half or a third of their sentence. The Ministry of Justice now expects the number released to be slightly fewer than six thousand, but it had not worked out exactly how many prisoners would be excluded after Burnham’s intervention.
No. 10 and Luke Sullivan
The shift comes as Burnham begins making the first difficult choices of his time in No. 10. Luke Sullivan, who was left out of Starmer’s government in 2024 and then went to Headland, will be a SpAd to Burnham in the new No. 10 political team and chief of staff to Chief Whip Anneliese Midgley.
Alex Norris, newly promoted to Justice Secretary, appeared on broadcast studios to explain the government’s position on the release changes. The Ministry of Justice had previously warned that it would run out of prison places by November.
MoJ release rules
The revised scheme draws a line between offenders. Rapists and serious child sex offenders are being excluded from early release, but people convicted of domestic abuse and manslaughter are still set to leave ahead of schedule.
That leaves the core operating question inside the prison system: how many places the exemptions will actually save before October. The answer will determine whether the early release plan still reaches thousands of prisoners, or whether the exclusions cut the number far further than the Ministry of Justice has so far modeled.
October prison releases
For prisoners covered by the scheme, the timetable has slipped from September to October. For the rest, the same early-release rules still apply, and the Ministry of Justice is still working through the total number affected by the new exemptions.
