Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, has written to Prime Minister Andy Burnham asking him to pass emergency laws to stop the government's plan to release prisoners early. She says a gap in the rules means some child sex offenders could walk free after serving as little as a third of their sentence. BBC News

Badenoch posted the letter on her X account on 6 August 2026. She wants Burnham to publish the full list of crimes that would still qualify for early release. She called the situation a "betrayal of victims" and said releasing sex offenders and violent criminals early "at all, ever" is a "total disgrace." She argued instead that non-violent criminals should not be sent to prison at all. BBC News; Facebook

The government plans to release about 5,000 prisoners in England and Wales before they have served their full sentences, because prisons are too full. On 3 August 2026, the prison population was 86,495 — 97% of the total spaces available. BBC News

After becoming prime minister, Burnham reviewed the scheme. On 4 August 2026, the government said prisoners convicted of rape, serious child sex offences and grooming offences would not be allowed early release from October. gov.uk; BBC News

But the ban does not cover a crime called indecent assault, which is defined under sections 14 and 15 of a law from 1956 called the Sexual Offences Act. Those sections are missing from the government's list of excluded offences. That means prisoners convicted of indecent assault could still qualify for early release. gov.uk; BBC News

Badenoch said this is not a small technical mistake. She wrote that the government itself had admitted in writing that some men convicted of grooming offences would still be released early. She pointed out that many cases of child sex abuse committed before 2004, including those in Rotherham and Rochdale, were charged as indecent assault. BBC News

Two real cases show how the gap works. Shahid Hussain was jailed for eight years in September 2024 for indecently assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Rotherham in 2003. Ajaz Karim was jailed for 21 months in December 2024 for indecent assault, after sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl at the school where he worked as a sports coach. Neither conviction is covered by the offences the government has excluded from early release. BBC News

Some prisoners who are not excluded could be freed after serving a third of their sentence, rather than the 40% or 50% that has applied under recent rules. BBC News

Burnham said he had wanted to exclude more offenders but that prison overcrowding made this impossible. He said making more prisoners exempt could cause the prison system to collapse. Justice Secretary Alex Norris apologised to families affected by the scheme. He said the changes exclude rapists, groomers and child sex offenders from early release. BBC News; Instagram

The political row goes beyond the letter. Badenoch had already called on 28 July 2026 for Burnham to bring in emergency legislation to stop the scheme entirely. The Conservative Party's "Labour's U-turns" page states that under the scheme rapists and serious child sex offenders could have been released before the end of their sentences. BBC News; Conservatives.com

Individual families have also spoken out. The mother of PC Andrew Harper, who was 28 when he was killed in 2019 after being dragged by a car as three teenagers fled the scene of a quad bike theft in Berkshire, said she was "devastated" to learn that two men jailed after her son's killing would still be eligible for early release. BBC News

The broader context is that the criminal justice system in England and Wales is caught between two pressures: prisons are full, but the public expects serious offenders to serve their full sentences. The policy applies only to England and Wales. Justice and prisons are devolved, meaning Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own prison systems and set their own release rules. Prisons in England and Wales have been operating at or near capacity for months, and barring certain offences from early release does not fix the underlying shortage of spaces that caused the scheme in the first place. Burnham's own admission that wider exclusions could collapse the system shows the point: the list of excluded offences is shaped by how much room there is in prisons, not just by what policymakers think is right.

The key question is whether the gap on indecent assault is an accidental mistake in the drafting of the rules or a deliberate choice made because there simply is not enough prison space. The cases of Hussain and Karim show that real offenders fall through it. Until the government publishes the full list Badenoch has demanded, or Parliament passes a law to close the gap, whether someone convicted of pre-2004 child sex abuse qualifies for release after a third of their sentence depends on which specific law the Crown Prosecution Service chose to charge them under, in some cases more than twenty years ago. That charging decision was made long before anyone was thinking about changing sentencing rules, yet it now decides who gets early release in a way the government's headline announcements do not capture.