We had no choice over early release, insists justice secretary

For Alex Norris, the justice secretary, it is not a choice. On Thursday the government will begin its hugely contentious early prison release scheme.

More than 700 offenders will be let out early to ease pressure on Britain’s strained prison system, the first of more than 4,500 who will be freed over the next ten months. 

Domestic abusers, stalkers and violent offenders will be released after serving as little as a third of their sentences. The alternative, Norris says, would be much worse — prisons would simply run out of space.

“The consequences of that would be either trials not taking place and charges being dropped because there was no prospect of an individual having a place in prison, or convicted prisoners being on some bog-standard form of home detention at best,” he says.

“Or the really terrible scenario — you could have individuals who have been arrested but being bailed back, perhaps into the same domestic setting. So there is in any meaningful sense a justice system not existing. We couldn’t allow that. We would never allow that.”

The scheme is politically toxic, given how victims, police chiefs and the probation service have gone public with their concerns about the risk of so many offenders being released at the same time.

Norris says that there will be “control outside of a prison setting”. “We have got the biggest expansion of tagging ever,” he says. “We’ve been preparing for this moment. If people don’t follow their conditions, they should expect the end state for that is being returned to prison.”

Under the plans some sex offenders and violent offenders will be confined to new “restriction zones” as little as a few miles wide, with the limits on their movements enforced by GPS tracking.

• Early release scheme latest: Hundreds of prisoners to be freed

“The history is that victims find out the licence conditions for their perpetrator and they live their lives around them,” Norris says. “That is the wrong way round. Our end state is to say, ‘We want your perpetrator to live their life around yours.’”

However, there are already some significant problems. Ministers said there would be a “presumption that all offenders are electronically tagged on release”, with exceptions made only in limited circumstances when it would be unsuitable. But The Times disclosed that the majority would not be fitted with tags before their release, instead being given them in the community. 

Then there are broader concerns about whether the tagging system is working. A report found that almost half of electronic tags used to track offenders are not fitted on time, leading to repeated breaches of court and prison orders.

“There are some promising signs of tagging at the point of leaving prison,” Norris says. “One of my first questions here has been about the quality of how electronic monitoring works. That performance has increased considerably over the last year or so. But those tools are only as good as the human being — the quality of the probation office matters.”

JOHN NGUYEN/JNVISUALS

Yet probation staff have voted overwhelmingly to go on strike after warning that the early release scheme will add to already excessive workloads. “We have very important conversations with their unions,” Norris says. “We’ve heard what they’ve said to us, and they expect us to deliver on workload, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Asked whether he can guarantee people will be safe, Norris chooses his words carefully: “I can guarantee that public protection and safety are at the absolute heart of everything that we do here. I can make that commitment that everything we do will have that lens on reducing reoffending.”

The fact is it is impossible for Norris to guarantee public safety. Serious criminals are being released, and it is inevitable that some of them will go on to reoffend. Alex Davies-Jones, the minister for victims, has admitted that women and girls may be put at risk by the early release of their domestic abusers and stalkers.

Does Norris share her concern? “We’re one ministerial team, so we speak with one voice and we have one mind,” he says. “I totally understand how anxious they [the victims] are, and my commitment is to work with them to try to help them live their life as fully as possible, to demonstrate to them the controls on the offender.

“We would not want, under normal circumstances, those perpetrators to leave a minute earlier than they would have done.”

Concerns are already being expressed that the early release scheme will not be enough. Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, and Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation, have warned that prisons remain at risk of running out of space.

Norris is adamant that this tranche of releases will effectively be “one and done”. “What I had to be absolutely confident about is that we’re not going to be back again having to do an emergency release scheme months down the line,” he says. “The assumptions, through the modelling we’ve done, we’re out of having to do an early release scheme again.”

The additional strain on the prison system is in part because of changes that Andy Burnham introduced over the summer. Shortly after he became prime minister he decided to go further than Sir Keir Starmer, his predecessor, and exempt rapists, serious child sex offenders and those convicted of grooming offences from being released.

He faced a huge backlash, not least because the plans would still have meant that the killers of PC Andrew Harper would have been released. The prime minister decided to change tack and told Norris, who was on holiday touring presidential libraries in the US at the time, that he wanted to go further.

Norris spent the summer working with officials and his ministerial colleagues and came up with a new plan — all those convicted of manslaughter would also be exempted from the early release scheme.

THAMS VALLEY POLICE/PA

Norris spoke to Harper’s mother, Debbie Adlam, before and after the decision was made. “She was very candid with me,” he says. “She never asked for special treatment, but she was very clear that she felt it was wrong that people who had taken lives were still in scope of the progression [early release] model.

“Ultimately they’re still living with the most unimaginable pain. I’m sorry that this was brought to her door as a result of the changes we were having to make. If you were a victim, there was uncertainty there. And I’ve apologised for that in parliament.”

Norris, who rose through the Labour ranks at Nottingham council and the unions before becoming an MP, says he is different from many of those in Westminster.

“I love my football, I go for a pint with my mates, I love watching the darts,” he says. “And like lots of men my age I put an accumulator on at three o’clock on a Saturday that is lost within hours. There’s quite a lot of the public like that too, and I think being that voice for government as well is quite important.”

Norris is not a lawyer by trade, like four of his predecessors as lord chancellor, meaning that he will not wear the traditional full-bottomed wig. “I am conscious, particularly with the legal profession, with the judiciary, that I have extra to prove,” he says. “This is an unbelievable job.”