Twelve more prisoners released in error, with two still missing, says Lammy

Justice Secretary David Lammy has said 12 prisoners have been accidentally released in the past three weeks, two of whom are still at large.

It comes on top of the 91 prisoners who were freed by mistake between April and October in England and Wales.

Speaking to the BBC, Lammy said there would always be a “human error” while prisons were using a paper-based system and that the situation would improve once a “completely digital system” was adopted.

He said there had been “a spike” in accidental releases but added it was now on “a downward trajectory”.

Speaking to ITV later, Lammy said he had been “reassured” that the two prisoners at large were not violent or sex offenders.

“I’m not going to give details of those cases, because these are operational decisions made by the police, and you’ll understand if they’re about to arrest somebody they don’t want me to blow the cover,” he added.

The subject of accidental releases gained attention after Hadush Kebatu, who was jailed after sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman while living in an asylum hotel in Epping, was mistakenly freed.

Shortly after Kebatu’s release, news emerged of two other prisoners who had been released in error – William Smith, who later handed himself in, and Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, who was rearrested.

The cases led to the government implementing new security checks on those being let out of prison.

The latest releases happened since 11 November, when Lammy gave a statement to the House of Commons, outlining the steps the government was taking to resolve the issue.

The number of prisoners who have been let out in error rose by 128% last year, increasing from 115 in 2023-2024 to 262 in the following year.

There were just over 57,000 releases of prisoners who had finished the custodial part of their sentences in England and Wales in 2024-25 – a rise of about 13% on the year before.

Lammy acknowledged there had been a rise in numbers adding: “I want to bring it down but we have got a mountain to climb.”

He said the problem had been partly caused by the system losing 6,000 officers under the previous Conservative government.

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has previously blamed the increase on “the confusion created by Labour’s botched early release scheme”, a project introduced by the government to ease overcrowding in prisons.

Responding to the news of the 12 new prisoner releases, he said “The public are consistently being put at risk because of his shambolic management. When will this fiasco end?”

Liberal Democrat spokeswoman Jess Brown-Fuller said: “It’s utterly unacceptable that public safety has been put at risk yet again – both the government and the prison service must own up to their failures and guarantee that these mistakes will stop happening once and for all.”

Last month, Lammy set out the actions the government was taking to tackle the problem including investing up to £10m for new AI tools to reduce human error and upgrade the paper-based system used by the prison system.

The government has also asked former deputy commissioner of the Met Police Dame Lynne Owens to conduct a review into the mistakes that led to Kebatu’s release and what had led to errors across the prison estate.

Kebatu was re-arrested two days after his release and has now been deported to Ethiopia.