ANDY BURNHAM’S interview on BBC News yesterday showed a Prime Minister who appears to be grappling sincerely with the dilemmas of Britain’s criminal justice system. He announced that the emergency release scheme will not allow prisoners…
Page B1From§Eachthe evening edition — 30 August 2026
Burnham keeps killers locked up after backlash; reformers still ask for reform, not politics.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: The Wider Early Release Scheme, whose exact scope nobody in government much liked to pin down, died this week after a short but voluble backlash. It is survived by a narrower version of itself, which now excludes grooming gang members and killers, including those convicted in the killing of Pc Harper, all of whom will remain behind bars under changes announced by Andy Burnham. It is preceded in death by the original promise that scope was settled.
The Scheme was, in its short life, meant to ease pressure on crowded prisons, a goal survived by the crowding itself, which nobody has announced any changes to. Malarkey is a word we don't use lightly in this column, but a policy revised only after the backlash arrived, rather than before it was announced, has a bit of the whippersnapper about it — quick to launch, slower to think.…
…(cont) We are told the changes represent a serious response to public concern. We believe that. We would also note that a call for real reform — not political point-scoring — was published the same week, which suggests the concern being responded to is not, in fact, fully addressed by narrowing the exemption list. The crowding remains. The point-scoring, evidently, does not require a scheme's death to continue; it just finds a new one to stand on.
Andy Burnham is not the deceased here, and this column does not accuse the living. But something did die this week — the version of the scheme that included the cases Britain would not accept, and with it, briefly, the idea that policy scope gets decided in the planning room instead of the comments section. There is a bit of shit that always ends up in this arrangement, and it is never the part anyone announces.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that Britain's prisons be reformed on their own timeline, not on the schedule of whichever backlash arrives loudest.
“Funny how the 'reform' only moves once the backlash gets loud enough — the scheme didn't get smarter, it got scared. And the minute the cameras turn, the actual fix everybody's been asking for, real prison reform, goes right back on the shelf.”
The receipts
SOME offenders including PC Andrew Harper’s killers will not be released early from jail after changes to a scheme aimed at reducing prison overcrowding, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced today. Plans will instead focus on freeing…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.