The accidental release of a migrant sex offender from prison is a sign that the UK justice system is “broken”, a minister has said.
Steve Reed called for the criminal justice system to be “rebuilt from the bottom up” after the mistaken release of Hadush Kebatu, who was imprisoned for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
The Ethiopian national was jailed for 12 months in September for the offence, and was wrongly freed from HMP Chelmsford on Friday morning instead of being sent to an immigration detention centre, in an incident that sparked widespread condemnation.
Speaking to Sky News on Monday, the housing secretary said: “This individual had no right to be in the country in the first place, let alone committing the kind of offences that he committed.
“I’m sure everybody else watching was just as shocked when they saw this individual had been released accidentally. It wasn’t that he made an escape bid: he was released in a way that should not have happened. Now, that is a sign, isn’t it, of a broken criminal justice system.”
Blaming the debacle on the previous Tory government, Mr Reed said: “But we know that, because when we were elected, the prisons were full up. There wasn’t room to house people who have got custodial sentences in the courts. One-third of professional staff in the criminal justice system have been got rid of under the previous government. We’re having to rebuild it from the bottom up.”
The UK’s prisons are already in crisis and subject to overcrowding. The Independent revealed this month that conditions are worse than ever, with a soaring maintenance backlog now approaching £2bn, having doubled between 2020 and 2024.
A quarter of prisoners in England and Wales are locked in jails that are not fire-safe, while hundreds are held in cells without toilets and forced to defecate in buckets and bags if there are not enough staff to let them out to use the toilet overnight.
Following the latest debacle, Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, warned on Monday that changes to the visa rules set to come into force in the new year will have an “enormously damaging” effect on prison staffing levels, which are already overstretched.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There are a large number of west African prison officers, on whom many prisons are reliant, who are in danger of having their visas revoked because of changes in policy at the Home Office – and that is going to have an enormously damaging effect on some prisons. There are a number of prisons that are going to lose so many officers that they’re going to be very difficult to run.”
Mr Taylor added that he had yet to see details of the extra checks prison governors have been ordered to undertake when inmates are freed.
He said: “I haven’t actually seen the checklist itself. I can absolutely understand that ministers are furious about this case, and want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Is it proportionate? Well, we’ll have to look at the checklist over the course of this week.”
Justice secretary David Lammy will set out a series of measures aimed at strengthening the system as he faces questions about the blunder from MPs in parliament.
Kebatu, who was living at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, when he sexually assaulted the girl, travelled to London after being released from HMP Chelmsford, and was arrested on Sunday morning in Finsbury Park after a two-day manhunt.
The father of Kebatu’s teenage victim said he hopes the sex offender will be “deported immediately” – which the justice secretary said should happen this week.
Mr Reed told broadcasters on Monday morning that he shared their “frustration and fury”, and pledged to announce an independent inquiry into what happened, in parliament on Monday.
According to government figures published in July, 262 prisoners were released in error in the year to March 2025 – a 128 per cent increase on the previous 12 months, during which 115 were erroneously set free.
But Mr Reed insisted there had been no change in policy under Labour that had led to the rise.
