A senior government minister has issued a stark warning that cells to hold newly arrested suspects could run dry within weeks unless ministers press ahead with a controversial scheme to release prisoners early from jail.
Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, defended the plan — which has drawn fierce criticism from domestic abuse charities, bereaved families and frontline probation staff — by pointing to what she described as a crisis of capacity left festering in the prison estate by the previous Conservative administration.
“Unpalatable choices”
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday, Phillipson said the government had been forced into “really difficult and unpalatable choices” by years of under-investment in prison places. She insisted the most serious offenders would not be freed under the scheme, with further details due to be set out in the coming days.
But in her most striking intervention yet, she laid bare the scale of the dilemma facing ministers: “The reality of what we are confronting is that, if allowed to go unchecked, we could end up in a position where someone who was arrested for very serious offences — for example, offences related to violence against a woman — and we wouldn’t have anywhere to send that individual. That was the full scale of the real crisis we face.”
The warning comes amid mounting pressure on the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, who has been wrestling with the competing demands of easing overcrowding in prisons while protecting victims from further distress.
A two-tier outcry
Under the government’s plans, sentences would not be ended early, but the custodial portion would be shortened, with the remainder served in the community — a principle that already governs the majority of jail terms handed down by courts in England and Wales.
That distinction has done little to silence opponents. On Friday, families bereaved by homicide wrote to the justice secretary, Alex Norris, demanding that anyone convicted of any form of manslaughter be excluded from the scheme outright. Victims, they said, were “being asked to bear the consequences of the prison capacity crisis.”
Among the signatories was Emma Webber, whose son Barnaby was fatally stabbed in Nottingham in 2023. His killer, Valdo Calocane, was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Diana Parkes, whose daughter Joanna Simpson was murdered by her estranged husband Robert Brown in 2010 — Brown likewise being found guilty of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility — also added her name.
Phillipson said she held “the utmost respect and sympathy for the victims and their families” and rounded squarely on the previous government for failing to build sufficient prison capacity during its time in office. “We didn’t create enough prison capacity in the years that they were in government so that we don’t have to be even considering these kinds of options,” she said, “which — in an ideal world — we would not be having to consider.”
A crisis foretold
The early release scheme is the second emergency measure introduced in less than a year. In January, ministers announced a package of reforms that took effect in March, designed to head off a projected crisis over the summer months. But Whitehall sources have long conceded that those steps were never expected to be sufficient to resolve the underlying problem, pointing instead to the wider Sentencing Act — which is currently working its way through Parliament — as the government’s long-term solution.
The Act would overhaul how courts in England and Wales pass sentence, with the aim of easing pressure on a system that has, at various points in recent years, run dangerously close to its operational limits.
Why it Matters
The government’s intervention lays bare a choice no administration wants to make publicly: keep dangerous suspects locked up at the risk of the system collapsing entirely, or shorten sentences to keep the system functioning and accept the anger of victims whose loved ones will never see full justice served. Phillipson’s comments amount to an admission that the second option is now the lesser of two evils — and that without sustained investment in prison places, ministers will find themselves back at this same grim crossroads sooner rather than later.
