In a piece of classic New Labour triangulation, Andy Burnham has written an article for the Telegraph on his party’s controversial prison release scheme. Consistent with his man-of-the-people image, the Prime Minister talks tough, explaining how he feels the public’s pain, that he has ensured the worst sexual offenders are exempted, and how he “wanted to do more”. There was no mention, tellingly, of the two men convicted of PC Andrew Harper’s manslaughter, who are eligible for release after serving only six and a half years in custody. Instead, the PM offered: “I know there will be concerns about who will still be released early for other offences. I have pushed to the very limits of what is possible to do.”

To be fair to Burnham, this is a crisis long in the making. Prison capacity is sorely lacking: although figures vary, between 2010-24 there were only around 1,000 extra cells added to the prison estate. The Cameroon austerity years butchered the entire criminal justice system. Police, courts, prisons and probation were all degraded, meaning that prisoners awarded early release are still poorly managed. Reoffending rates, unsurprisingly, remain stubbornly high.

Now, the chickens hatched by David Cameron and George Osborne are coming home to roost, and Burnham’s task is to fix the problem. In this respect, the new PM is correct in saying Labour inherited a mess. Does that mean, though, that Burnham is correct when he insists he’s pushed the system to its limits?

The crisis presents a cash-strapped Labour administration with both political and practical challenges. The party is instinctively sympathetic to the penal reform lobby, which doubts the efficacy of incarceration except for the most violent offenders. Making an arch-reformer like James Timpson a prisons minister spoke to this tradition, along with asking the Tory “wet” David Gauke to write Labour’s original early release policy. This is the policy, remember, which Burnham had to revisit after the furore around the early release of PC Harper’s killers. This lack of proper triage, with prisoner release viewed primarily as an administrative exercise, speaks to the criminal justice elite’s tin ear on how the public view such issues.

Political parties are notoriously difficult to steer when asked to go against the grain of their beliefs, and Labour is firmly in the grip of the so-called “soft Left”. Will Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, seen as the token “Blue Labour” Cabinet member, have the political bandwidth to forge a more radical approach while firefighting backbench attacks on her immigration reforms? As usual, the Government is seemingly treating the prison crisis — and it is a crisis — as an administrative problem rather than an emergency.

Then there’s another elephant on “A” Wing of HMP England and Wales: a thorny issue to which the PM only alluded in his Telegraph article: foreign national offenders, or FNOs. As of 2025, there were nearly 11,000 FNOs across the UK prison system — nearly 12% of the prison population. Deporting many of them would immediately increase capacity, although this would of course require derogation from the ECHR. This is technically permissible during an emergency, but again Labour’s ideological bent precludes even considering such an option. This is a party whose MPs overwhelmingly hail from public and third-sector organisations, and for whom human rights legislation is inviolable.

These problems are particularly intractable for a Labour government whose members baulk at populist calls for “Nightingale Prisons”, which would in any case fall foul of Britain’s labyrinthine planning and human rights laws. So we are left with Burnham’s factory settings: relatability, emoting and spin. He speaks of a criminal justice version of Labour’s beloved breakfast clubs, “packages” promising “£10 million in new funding to provide trauma-informed contacts for victims, alongside a new national helpline”. Nobody will be fooled, especially not the family of PC Andrew Harper, whose killers laughed in court at their sentencing. They’re probably still laughing.