A union leader has warned that Andy Burnham's decision to review a mass early prisoner release scheme has created "a sense of chaos" inside His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), with frontline staff unable to get clear guidance on whether to keep preparing for a release date set for 2 September 2026.

Tania Bassett, national officer for the probation union Napo, told The Guardian that up to 6,000 prisoners across England and Wales were being prepared for early release under the scheme, which is a central provision of the Sentencing Act 2026. The union asked HMPPS directly whether preparations should continue and what the operational plan is following Burnham's review announcement. As of 23 July 2026, HMPPS had no answer, according to The Guardian's reporting.

Burnham said on 22 July 2026 that he would examine "the whole of the policy" with the new justice secretary, Alex Norris. The commitment followed growing political pressure over the scope of the scheme, including the disclosure that Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, two of the three men convicted for the killing of police officer Andrew Harper, may be eligible for early release under its provisions.

To understand the stakes, it helps to know what the scheme changes. Under the previous system, prisoners serving standard determinate sentences (fixed-length terms) were automatically released at the halfway point. The Sentencing Act 2026 replaces that with what it calls an "earned progression model" — a tiered, behaviour-based system under which most prisoners can be released after serving one-third of their sentence rather than 50%. The remaining time is served under strict supervision in the community, with electronic tagging.

The practical problem is one of timing. Probation release preparations typically require at least six to eight weeks of work per case. That includes risk assessments, accommodation referrals, home visits, victim liaison coordination, and multi-agency safeguarding plans. With a target release date of 2 September and uncertainty persisting as of late July, the window for completing that preparatory work is narrowing fast. If the scheme proceeds, staff need to know now. If it does not, resources committed to preparations can be redirected. Either way, silence from HMPPS headquarters leaves frontline officers working without a clear directive.

Napo has previously criticised the decision to extend the early release scheme to 70 days, according to reporting referenced by BBC Radio Newcastle. Separately, a Napo representative told the i newspaper that serious crime resulting from the early release scheme was "inevitable" because of existing probation service issues, as relayed through Channel 4 News.

The broader context here is the tension between legislative design and operational capacity. The earned progression model was conceived as a way to incentivise rehabilitation by tying release to behaviour rather than a fixed calendar date. But the Act's implementation rests entirely on a probation service that, by its own union's account, lacks the staffing and infrastructure to manage an influx of supervised releases on this scale. Releasing up to 6,000 prisoners at the one-third point of their sentences, each requiring multi-agency safeguarding plans and electronic tagging, places a demand footprint on the probation estate that Napo characterises as unmanageable even before the current uncertainty is factored in. The union's description of serious reoffending as "inevitable" is a judgment about systemic risk, not a prediction about any individual case, but it frames the political question now facing Burnham and Norris: whether the policy can be salvaged through modification, or whether the gap between legislative ambition and delivery capacity is too wide to bridge before September.

Burnham's commitment to review "the whole of the policy" suggests the scope of reconsideration is not limited to the eligibility threshold or the 70-day extension. A full policy review could encompass the one-third release point, the supervision regime, the earned progression criteria, or the implementation timeline itself. Each of those variables has cascading operational consequences for HMPPS, for the probation estate, and for the prisons from which releases are planned.

What remains unresolved is whether the 2 September date holds. If it does, HMPPS will need to resume or confirm preparations within days to meet the six-to-eight-week preparation window. If it slips, the prison population pressure that the scheme was designed to relieve will persist into the autumn. The justice secretary's office has not yet set a timeline for the review's conclusion, and Napo's unanswered questions to HMPPS suggest that, at the operational level, the policy is currently in suspension without a formal instruction to halt.