Burnham Orders Justice Secretary to Revise Early Release Scheme After Harper Killers Remain Eligible
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has instructed Justice Secretary Alex Norris to return to parliament in September with further revisions to the prisoner early release scheme, after it emerged that two of the three killers of PC Andrew Harper remain eligible for early release under changes due to take effect next month. The directive, first reported in the Times, marks the latest twist in a policy saga that has dogged Burnham's three-week-old premiership. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner confirmed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Burnham had tasked Norris with finding a solution to keep Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers behind bars. The Guardian
The revised early release scheme, announced to take effect from September 2026, would exclude around 1,000 fewer prisoners than initially proposed. Cole and Bowers, convicted alongside Henry Long for the manslaughter of PC Harper in 2019, remained within the scheme's eligibility criteria despite the changes. Long, who drove the car that dragged PC Harper to his death, was not affected because his longer sentence placed him outside the scheme's parameters.
Burnham had paused the early release programme on August 5, announcing an "urgent review" to minimise public risk after the Harper case came to light. Justice Secretary Norris apologised to PC Harper's family on behalf of the government over the early release plans the same day. Some prisoner releases proceeded regardless of the pause, according to Channel 4 News.
The constraint facing the government is one of prison capacity. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Burnham said he could "look people in the eye" and say "there was nothing more I could have asked for without risking the prison system reaching capacity and collapsing within months." A Downing Street spokesperson reinforced this, saying No 10 could not simply adapt the scheme to exclude those convicted of the manslaughter of an emergency worker, citing the risk that wider exemptions would cause the Prison Service to run out of space.
Rayner indicated the government is exploring alternative mechanisms to free capacity without broadening exclusions in ways that destabilise the estate. Options under consideration include extending early release to prisoners on indefinite IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences, releasing more women, and accelerating the deportation of foreign offenders. The logic is straightforward: if specific categories like Harper's killers are carved out, equivalent space must be found elsewhere to prevent the system exceeding its operational limits.
The political pressure on Burnham has been intensifying from multiple directions. Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner Matthew Barber jointly wrote to the prime minister urging him to keep Harper's killers behind bars, as reported on August 10. The case carries particular resonance for policing: the Telegraph reported concerns that releasing those convicted of killing a police officer would affect police recruitment and retention.
The broader context here is one of a new prime minister, in office only since late July, confronting an early test of his justice policy against the operational realities of a prison estate operating near its limits. The IPP sentence option is politically fraught in its own right; indefinite sentences, abolished for new cases in 2012, have long been a source of campaigning controversy, and expanding early release for IPP prisoners would draw its own criticism. Speeding up foreign offender deportations, meanwhile, runs into well-documented legal and diplomatic obstacles that no government has fully overcome.
What remains unresolved is whether Norris can engineer a revision narrow enough to capture Cole and Bowers specifically without triggering the cascade of exemptions Downing Street has warned against. The September parliamentary return now serves as the deadline. Until then, the two remain eligible under the existing terms of the scheme.
Alex Norris's elevation to Justice Secretary came after his prior role as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Local Growth & Building Safety at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, a position he held from July 2024. He now carries the burden of reconciling the political imperative of keeping Harper's killers incarcerated with the structural limits of a prison system the prime minister says is months from collapse.
The case of PC Andrew Harper, killed in the line of duty in August 2019, has now become the defining pressure point on Burnham's early justice agenda. Three weeks into his premiership, the prime minister is caught between a public and policing lobby demanding accountability for a police officer's death and a penal system whose margins for manoeuvre are, by the government's own account, close to exhausted.
