The system for releasing prisoners for British jails currently relies on “boxes and boxes of paperwork”. That was the major takeaway from prisons minister Lord Timpson, who faced questions in the House of Lords this afternoon after the high-profile mistaken release of Brahim Kaddour-Cherif from HMP Wandsworth.
Timpson’s appearance is the first time a government minister has faced scrutiny in parliament about the Kaddour-Cherif incident, after a bizarre PMQs session last Wednesday that saw justice secretary (and deputy prime minister) David Lammy dodge the question of accidental releases no fewer than five times when grilled by the Tories’ James Cartlidge. Lammy’s aides later admitted he had known about Kaddour-Cherif’s wrongful release, but as the Commons has been in recess it fell to Timpson to offer some clarifications.
On a purely political level, the headline was that he and Lammy had both been informed that Kaddour-Cherif had been let out by mistake “first thing on Wednesday morning when we woke up”, before PMQs. Timpson (unsurprisingly) defended his boss’s decision to duck informing the Commons of this when asked repeatedly by Cartlidge, arguing that “the deputy prime minister did not have the accurate information because the information was changing by the minute” and that it would have been “irresponsible to potentially give incorrect information to parliament”. That is unlikely to satisfy MPs who took issue with Lammy’s aggressively indignant performance and may well wonder why, if the information was changing so quickly, the government was able to confirm what had happened almost as soon as PMQs had finished. The justice secretary can no doubt expect his own grilling once the Commons returns on Tuesday.
But to return to the Lords, the most revealing answers had nothing to do with what Lammy knew when. Anyone wondering how the prisons system could fail – multiple times – at the most basic task of ensuring the right individuals are incarcerated at any one time might want to take note.
Timpson warned of “multiple opportunities for failure in the system” – chief among them, the archaic paper-based practice of keeping track of prisoners. He referred three times to the “boxes of paperwork” at the heart of the prisons system, which seems to be stuck in the pre-computer era. The lack of a central database, and digital infrastructure that is both limited and substandard, mean basic errors can easily creep in – as the journalist and former HMP inmate Chris Atkins recently told me, mistakes over release dates are often the result of someone reading handwriting wrong.
The prisons minister flagged other issues also relating to the lack of digital investment, such as prison officers making manual calculations as to how long an offender has left of their sentence (often extremely complicated if they have been convicted of multiple offenses, made more so by the government’s early release scheme to deal with overcrowding in prisons) and confusion over prisoners with different aliases. At the most basic level, sometimes officers are not even sure they are dealing with the right individual. HMP Wandsworth, from which Kaddour-Cherif and another prisoner were wrongly released in recent weeks, processes 2,000 releases a year. The potential for error is significant – especially when, according to Timpson’s conversations with prison governors, the release checks have become far more complex and time-consuming in recent years. (Something to consider when ministers talk of additional checks to strengthen safeguards.)
James Timpson is not a career politician. He was ennobled and made prisons minister by Keir Starmer because of his specific expertise in this area, having championed rehabilitation and opportunities for ex-offenders for decades as CEO of his family business. Both Theresa May and Boris Johnson previously tapped him up for roles. His brother was a Conservative MP.
So his comments about the degradation of the prisons system under the last Tory government are perhaps more striking than they would be coming from another Labour minister. He did not mention (as he could have) that over 800 prisoners were wrongly released under the Conservatives, although he did note that “releases in error have been increasing for years” and are “another symptom of the justice system crisis inherited by this government”. Timpson directly linked the current issues with austerity, under which the Ministry of Justice’s budge was cut by 25 per cent. The Conservative government, he argued, did not build enough prisons or maintain the ones it had; it reduced staffing levels with the result that experienced staff left; and it failed to invest in upgrading the system’s technology. All of these decisions have factored into the present reality: a prisons estate that is dangerously overcrowded, chronically understaffed by officers who do not have the training, resources or technology to properly do their jobs.
Some of Timpson’s suggestions may raise eyebrows. At one point, he suggested AI chatbots might be utilised to help prison staff make sure they’re releasing the right people at the right time. More generally, he has put on record his belief that too many people are in prison who should not be there, especially women – a view that is not shared across the political spectrum, or indeed within the Labour government.
But it is undeniable that decades of under-investment have left the UK’s prison system in dire shape, without the digital infrastructure we would expect from any modern public service. A rich democracy in the 21st century should not be relying on “boxes and boxes of paper” to ensure the right people are kept behind bars.
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