Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak risked the total collapse of the criminal justice system as he overruled ministers and officials who wanted to release prisoners early from jail, a damning independent review has found.
Dame Anne Owers, the former chief inspector of prisons, slammed the Tory government for its shocking mismanagement of justice, lurching from crisis to crisis and taking minimum possible actions to avoid “meltdown”.
She said the party broke its promises on building new prisons, adding just 500 places between 2010 and 2024, and it reached the point where there were almost no cells left.
To avoid overwhelming the jails, court hearings were put off and big police operations had to be delayed, the report found.
In mid-2023, senior figures in the Ministry of Justice – including Justice Secretary and Sunak ally, Alex Chalk KC – knew a prison early release scheme had to be implemented to ease the crisis.
But Mr Sunak ignored Mr Chalk’s pleas, waiting until October when “the system was within three days of potential collapse”.
Dame Anne said “angry and frustrated” officials were forced to repeatedly explain why alternatives to early release of prisoners had been assessed and would not work, while a system within government was designed only to stave off repeated crises, rather than fix the deeper-lying issues.
“All those the review spoke to expressed frustration and sometimes anger at the reluctance to accept and then act on the well-documented and imminent crisis, or to agree any coherent plan to avert it”, she wrote.
“Many of those spoken to expressed considerable frustration that they were accused of ‘crying wolf’ even when the wolf was visibly at the door.”
Her report highlighted decades of failings within successive governments, as she criticised politicians for failing to plan to avoid major problems.
“The systems that were set up were not in fact governance systems: they were the equivalent of hurricane warning systems, designed to monitor and ride out storms, rather than to build and plan safe systems that can prevent or withstand them”.
More than 13,000 prisoners were set free early from their sentences between October 2023 and September last year, under the system set up by the Conservatives.
Dame Anne said release schemes under the Tories – delayed until the “very last minute” - sparked chaos in prisons and the probation service, as officials deluged with new policies were terrified of accidentally settling prisoners free too early or by mistake, while “resettlement” schemes for newly-free prisoners had not yet been put in place.
Senior MoJ officials kept a detailed log of decision-making, anticipating there could be a public inquiry or Parliamentary investigation into the crisis.
After winning power, Labour continued to release prisoners early, bringing in a more structured scheme.
The Sunak government was notably quiet about the early release of prisoners, which happened in the final months of the administration and as a heavy election defeat grew increasingly likely.
“In spite of the layers of assurance, arguments and evidence had to be repeated and rehashed, options already long-discussed and proven to be undeliverable had to be resurrected and re-argued”, the report set out.
“Many believed that the default position was to do as little as possible as late as possible, with the consequence that the system repeatedly reached the brink of collapse, rather than accepting the inevitable and getting ahead of the crisis.”
Dame Anne said a system of “salami slicing” was adopted, instead of the decisive action that Mr Chalk was pushing for.
Such was the scale of the crisis, the day after Mr Sunak called a General Election an emergency COBRA meeting had to be held to consider if the Civil Contingencies Act needed to be deployed, to “allow ministers to make emergency regulations in case the criminal justice system broke down during the pre-election period”.
Current Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the report laid out “the disgraceful way the last Conservative Government ran our prisons”.
Former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke has been commissioned by Labour to draw up plans for sentencing reform, to try to avoid a future prison crisis.
His ideas include axing short prison sentences, incentivising good behaviour in prison with earlier release, and more lenient sentencing for defendants who plead guilty early.
Current Conservative Party front benchers have tried to accuse Labour of being soft on crime, with justice reforms on the horizon.
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick claimed on social media that Labour is proposing an 80 per cent sentence reduction for burglars, thugs and stalkers.
But he faced a backlash from lawyers who pointed out past Conservative governments had fostered an environment that is effectively soft on crime, thanks to jails which are full up and struggling to deliver meaningful rehabilitation, as well as underfunded courts racking up huge backlogs and years of delays to trials.
