Three prisoners, who were all mistakenly released at least four months ago, remain on the run with their whereabouts unknown.<\/p>\n
That was announced by the justice secretary, David Lammy, to the Commons earlier today.<\/p>\n
Lammy explained that in the year to March 2025, there were around 57,000 routine releases from prison.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the same period, 262 prisoners in England and Wales were mistakenly released – either too early or too late into their sentences.<\/p>\n
That much we already knew.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lammy also revealed, for the first time, that between 1 April 2025 and 31 October 2025, 91 prisoners were released in error.<\/p>\n
Out of all of these early releases, three men remain unaccounted for.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They are:\u00a0<\/p>\n
A man jailed for failing to surrender to the police, and was released almost a year ago, in DecemberAnother who was in prison for a class B offence and has been missing for even longer – since August 2024And a third, who was jailed for aggravated burglary and was released by mistake in June this year<\/p>\n
Of these, one is a foreign national – but Lammy didn’t say who.<\/p>\n
A fourth potential prisoner on the run<\/p>\n
But among all these statistics was a fourth potential prisoner, whose identity and exact situation remained illusive.<\/p>\n
Lammy said: “I have been informed this afternoon, that HMPPS [His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service] are investigating a further case of a potential release in error on the 3rd of November, who may still be at large.<\/p>\n
“But it is symptomatic of the data issues we inherited that this is all the information I have been given at this time.”<\/p>\n
What is clear is that it appears a fourth prisoner has also been wrongly been released – but the Prison Service is yet to figure out who they are, when they were released, and what they were in prison for.<\/p>\n
Lammy’s Conservative Party rival, Robert Jenrick, was quick to mock the minister for his lack of answers.<\/p>\n
He said: “The justice secretary is so clueless, he’s literally lost track of how many prisoners he’s lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“He says today a prisoner may have been accidentally released last Monday. Well, has he looked? He’s either in his cell or is not. What a complete and utter farce he’s presiding over.<\/p>\n
So, it seems there is a fourth missing prisoner – though Lammy stopped short of confirming it, and this detail was all too easy to miss in the hurley burley of the Commons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three prisoners, who were all mistakenly released at least four months ago, remain on the run with their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-258087","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}