Good morning. Maybe the most gobsmacking detail about the accidental release of Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford was this, from a delivery driver who was delivering equipment to the prison as he left: Kebatu, who was serving a sentence for sexual assault and was due to be deported, appeared baffled as he walked free, and lingered outside the gates for an hour and a half before heading away. “They [the officers] were basically sending him away, saying, ‘Go, you’ve been released, you go,’” the driver told Sky News. “He kept scratching his head and saying, ‘Where do I go, where do I go?’”
On its face, that might look like incompetence. But the fiasco of Kebatu’s release may point to much bigger issues in the prison system. Yesterday, the justice secretary, David Lammy blamed “human error” – while the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) called the suspension of a single officer “unjust”.
A new checklist for prisoner release is now in place, and an inquiry chaired by a former senior Met police officer is underway. Today’s newsletter, with Institute for Government criminal justice researcher Cassia Rowland, is about whether any of that is likely to be enough to stop this happening again. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Hurrican Melissa | Jamaicans have started to take shelter from Hurricane Melissa as the category 5 storm neared the coast amid warnings of catastrophic flooding, landslides and extensive infrastructure damage. The slow-moving giant is set to make landfall early on Tuesday.
Climate crisis | Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned. In his only interview before next month’s Cop30 climate summit, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the target.
Reform UK | Nigel Farage has defended remarks made by a Reform MP who said seeing adverts full of black and Asian people “drives her mad”. The Reform UK leader said if he felt Sarah Pochin’s words were “deliberately and genuinely racist”, he would have “taken action” against her.
Sudan | Fears grew for hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in El Fasher after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said it had captured the city, which it has been besieging for more than a year in Sudan’s civil war.
Ministry of Defence | At least 49 family members and colleagues of Afghans affected by the MoD’s mass data breach have been killed, according to research submitted to a parliamentary committee.
In depth: ‘There’s a sense that everything is breaking – it’s a slow-motion collapse’
On Friday, Hadush Kebatu was supposed to be transferred to the custody of the Home Office for deportation to his home country of Ethiopia. Instead, somehow, he was freed. The suspension of a prison officer at HMP Chelmsford appears to suggest that individual human error played a part; on the other hand, the POA insists that the officer in question, who was responsible for going through the paperwork to ensure that the right prisoner was being released, “is not the only one involved in this entire process.” And the mistake happened in a system that most observers say is on its knees, and where a similar error could have much more severe consequences in the future.
“It is most damaging from a public trust perspective,” Cassia Rowland said. “There’s just a sense that everything is breaking. My mental model of it is slow-motion collapse: it’s not that things are on the brink, it’s that they’re failing more and more seriously, in more and less visible ways.”
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How did the accidental release happen?
Kebatu’s exit from HMP Chelmsford is about as far away from digging a hole behind a poster of Ursula Andress as it’s possible to get. According to the delivery driver who spoke to Sky, named as Simofficers at the gate ignored his doubts over what had just happened, saying, “You’re released, you’re released.”
Accidental releases are usually the result of miscalculating the date when someone should be freed. That does not appear to be not what happened here. “It appears the error was that he was incorrectly flagged for release rather than deportation,” Rowland said. One member of staff would have been responsible for completing the paperwork confirming Kebatu’s release 14 days earlier; two days before his release, a senior manager would have checked it over. But the apparent confusion at the gate may be indicative of a broader problem.
“Something has clearly gone wrong in that situation,” Rowland said. “The fact that nobody felt able to say, hang on a minute – they can’t have thought they were setting him up for a successful release if they were shooing him away from the prison gates.”
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Was this human error or evidence of a systemic problem?
Even if one officer bears the lion’s share of responsibility for the mistake, it is hard to ignore the system within which they were operating: 262 people were released from prison by mistake in 2024-25, more than double the number the previous year and more than four times the number in 2014-15.
A senior prison staffer made the link explicit in an interview with the BBC: “This is down to a series of mistakes probably because staff are overworked and in short supply,” the staffer said. “It’s not just one prison officer who’s to blame. That would be unfair.”
HMP Chelmsford has a chequered recent history, with a disastrous 2020 inspection leading officers to effectively walk out of a violent and unsafe prison and a follow-up report the year after saying that little had improved. A more recent inspection noted improvements but also pointed to an increasing rate of “churn”, with officers “managing more admissions, transfers and immediate releases without additional resources”.
“Churn is really high in a lot of prisons at the moment,” Rowland said. “And with so many people coming in and going out of prisons, it substantially increases the risk of these kinds of mistakes happening.”
The loss of experience among prison staff is another ongoing problem that can make incidents such as the one at HMP Chelmsford more likely: while the leaving rate among operational staff across the Prison Service was 4% in 2009-10, and 7.5% a decade ago, it now stands at 12.5%.
“You have the leaving rate among more senior staff doubling since 2010, as well,” Rowland said. “So you don’t have the mentorship for junior staff to learn by example. That makes them more likely to leave in turn. It means that those kinds of common sense calls – ‘Hang on a minute, why isn’t he leaving, let’s see what’s going on’ – are less likely to be made, because people don’t feel confident or empowered to say that something isn’t right.”
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What do we know about resources in the prison system?
Rowland’s diagnosis of slow-motion collapse is not an unusual view of a system that has faced severe underfunding and growing numbers for years. In August, a review by former prisons watchdog Dame Anne Owers said the prison system had been in crisis because of overcrowding for more than a year, but that Rishi Sunak refused to cut jail numbers. That forms part of a broader problem of inadequate resources across the justice system, from probation to the courts.
Rowland published a well-timed report on this last week, full of alarming statistics, which concluded: “The Labour government has successfully eased the immediate prison capacity crisis. But the situation in prisons remains extremely poor, with rampant drug use, limited purposeful activity and very high levels of violence.”
While Labour took the politically difficult step of pursuing the early release programme rejected by Sunak, turning that around looks extremely difficult given the wider context. “There are multiplier effects where problems in one part of the system make problems in other parts of it worse, and things snowball from there,” Rowland said.
While cases like Kebatu’s make the headlines, a more ordinary problem is what happens when people are released as they should be. “Probation is disastrous at the moment,” Rowland said. “The system is utterly overwhelmed. There’s a 30% vacancy rate for qualified probation officers – that is ludicrous. It makes it impossible to run a properly functioning system.”
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What’s being proposed to stop it happening again?
As well as the suspension of an officer, there will now be a five page “ticklist” that asks officers to check prisoners’ details, as well as any tattoos or scars against a photograph before they are set for release. And Lammy announced an inquiry to be chaired by former Metropolitan police deputy commissioner Lynne Owens.
“It’s pretty understandable if in the immediate aftermath the government wants to take some steps to make sure it’s not going to happen again immediately,” Rowland said. “And it’s not necessarily inappropriate for the government to ask, given it’s not just a one-off case: how do we get to grips with the problem? Without knowing more specifics, it’s hard to know if it’s sensible and proportionate. What they shouldn’t be doing is panicking and implementing processes that are going to waste people’s time.”
Senior prison officers appear to think there is a risk of exactly that happening, while the chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, told BBC Radio 4 yesterday that he did not have enough information to say whether the changes were appropriate.
“They should avoid pinning it all on one person, because that won’t encourage an open approach to mistakes,” Rowland said, pointing out that 20% of prison officers who left the service last year were dismissed – a number which, even if it points to individual failings, is too large to dismiss as a “bad apple” problem.
“If this is the tenth time someone’s been really careless, that’s one thing – but there is a real problem with getting the right people in the right roles, and performance,” Rowland said. “So they have to think about how they get their processes right.”
What else we’ve been reading
Cut-price medical tourism and “filler fatigue” are just a couple of the reasons that a growing number of women are having facelifts in their 20s and 30s. Kate McCusker’s deep dive into the trend is a startling read. Lucinda Everett, newsletters team
Ahead of Wednesday’s elections in the Netherlands, Cas Mudde has a great piece about how the success of Geert Wilders has normalised the far right there – with future alliances ruled out “not because of Wilders’ anti-constitutional ideology but for his ‘immature’ and ‘irresponsible’ behaviour”. Archie
I enjoyed Cas Holman’s piece about how US protests are becoming more playful – not because Americans are any less serious about defending their rights, but because play helps people stay “agile amid the unknowns, and resilient through adversity”. Lucinda
After Plaid Cymru beat Reform into second place in Caerphilly last week, this Anywhere But Westminster video tells the story of the community spirit that prevailed. Archie
If you missed it yesterday, Anna Moore talked to Caroline Flack’s mother, Christine, about the documentary she has made to help her, and the public, understand what really happened in the lead-up to her daughter’s death by suicide. Lucinda
Sport
Football | Brendan Rodgers has resigned as manager of Celtic after a disappointing start to the season, and will be replaced on an interim basis by former boss Martin O’Neill. News of Rodgers’ departure was accompanied by a broadside against him from major shareholder Dermot Desmond, who criticised his “self-serving” behaviour.
Rugby | George Ford is likely to start at fly-half when England begin their autumn internationals campaign against Australia at Twickenham on Saturday. The Sale Sharks No 10 will come in for Fin Smith, the established first-choice during the Six Nations.
Football | Sheffield Wednesday could face two further points deductions this season for breaching English Football League regulations, but the administrators of the Championship crisis club are optimistic that there are “four or five” credible bidders.
The front pages
“Ministers warned not to scapegoat prison staff over sex offender case” says the Guardian, and while we’re on Channel arrivals the Times has “Small boat migrants to be housed in barracks”. The Financial Times’ lead is “Reeves’ budget sums face £20bn blow from steeper productivity downgrade” and the i paper also covers the contents of the red box: “Bigger tax hikes and spending cuts on way in crunch budget, Reeves signals”. So too the Mail, worrying as ever for the average punter: “Threat of a mansion tax sparks house market chaos” – a levy on homes over £2m has not been ruled out. Top story in the Mirror is “£10m slap in the face”, about Michelle Mone (of PPE Medpro infamy) and a flat in Florida. The Express has “Grooming gang probe ‘rigged from the start’”. Outside politics the Telegraph runs with “NHS to offer same-day prostate cancer test”. A positive health story in the Metro too: “NHS printed me a new face”.
Today in Focus
Is London ready for driverless taxis?
Autonomous cabs are a staple in some US cities – but how will they cope with London’s streets? Gwyn Topham and Johana Bhuiyan report
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
“Blokes cringe if you talk about it in the pub … [yet] menstrual fluid has so much potential,” says medical researcher Caroline Gargett. So much potential that some are wondering if it could be “the most overlooked opportunity” in women’s health.
To that end, several largely female-led “femtech” startups and a handful of academic research teams are looking at how period blood – collected non-invasively – can be used to help test for a range of women’s health conditions, including endometriosis, traditionally diagnosed through surgery.
Much of the research focuses on using menstrual effluent to help diagnose gynaecological and reproduction health conditions. It also might be used to screen for cancers, track hormones and monitor diabetes, and one group is investigating its potential in stem cell research. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meanwhile, is so interested in the area that it has launched a $10m menstruation science initiative in early 2025. As MIT’s Linda Griffith put it: “This is frontier science.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
