Burnham Orders New Revisions to Early Release Scheme After PC Harper Killers Remain Eligible
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has told Justice Secretary Alex Norris to come back to parliament in September with further changes to the prisoner early release scheme, after it emerged that two of the three killers of PC Andrew Harper are still eligible for early release under changes due next month. The directive, first reported in the Times, is the latest twist in a policy saga that has trailed Burnham's three-week-old premiership. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner confirmed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Burnham had asked Norris to find a way to keep Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers behind bars. The Guardian
The revised early release scheme, set 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, still met 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 put him outside the scheme's scope.
Burnham had paused the early release programme on August 5, announcing an "urgent review" to reduce 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 went ahead anyway, according to Channel 4 News.
The constraint facing the government is prison capacity. England and Wales have a fixed number of prison places, and the system is so close to its limit that there is little room to keep people locked up longer without running out of space. 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 change the scheme to exclude those convicted of the manslaughter of an emergency worker, because wider exemptions would cause the Prison Service to run out of room.
Rayner indicated the government is exploring other ways to free up capacity without broadening exclusions in ways that destabilise the prison estate. Options under consideration include extending early release to prisoners on IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences, releasing more women, and speeding up 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 stop the system exceeding its operational limits.
The political pressure on Burnham has been building from several 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 weight 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, facing an early test of his justice policy against the operational realities of a prison system running near its limits. The IPP sentence option is politically fraught in its own right; these 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 design 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 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.
