Andy Burnham has told his team to pause the early prison release changes due to begin in September, ordering an urgent review before any prisoner is released under the policy.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Burnham said he was working closely with the new justice secretary on the matter. He confirmed that no prisoners would be released under the policy until the review was conducted and "everything possible is done to minimise risk to the public," according to BBC News.

The early release scheme allowed prisoners to be released after serving half of their sentence rather than the usual two-thirds. The remainder would be spent in the community under monitoring, with the possibility of recall to prison if they re-offended. The policy was introduced to ease overcrowding in the prison system, a pressure the government projected would have seen jails run out of space entirely by June had no action been taken, per gov.uk.

The decision to freeze the scheme follows criticism from opposition parties, victims, and their families. Thousands of letters were sent to victims warning them that the early release scheme was coming in September. Burnham's intervention was prompted in part by anger over the possibility that the killers of PC Harper could benefit from the policy, GB News reported.

Burnham is also exploring how to tighten the scheme, including potentially banning child sex offenders from early release altogether, according to The Times.

The pause is a notable moment in the development of the government's prison capacity strategy. Ministers had already taken temporary steps, reducing the proportion of certain custodial sentences served in prison from 50% to 40%, as set out by the lord chancellor in July 2024 (gov.uk). A subsequent announcement in September 2025 introduced an "earned progression model" — under which prisoners who break the rules spend longer inside — alongside what was described as the biggest-ever expansion of electronic tagging (gov.uk). In April 2026, the Deputy Prime Minister pledged to cut prison release mistakes to "as close to zero as possible," backed by up to £82 million over the Spending Review for a digital overhaul of the prison system (gov.uk).

The broader context here is the tension between managing acute operational pressure on the prison estate and maintaining public confidence in sentencing. The government's own projections made clear that without intervention the system would have reached capacity, a scenario that would have left ministers with no discretionary levers at all. The early release mechanism was the principal tool used to buy time. Burnham's pause narrows that window while the review is conducted, and leaves the justice secretary with the task of finding a route that satisfies both the operational imperative and the political demand for safeguards.

The question of which offender categories should be excluded from early release is not new, but Burnham's public exploration of a ban on child sex offenders signals a willingness to carve out exceptions that go beyond the existing framework. If adopted, such exclusions would reduce the number of prisoners the scheme can relieve, potentially reopening the capacity gap the policy was designed to close. How the new justice secretary responds, and whether additional measures such as expanded tagging or accelerated prison builds are brought forward to compensate, will shape the next phase of the government's approach.

For victims and their families, the thousands of warning letters already sent have done their damage. Burnham's pause may stop further releases under the current terms, but it does not undo the anxiety already created among those notified that offenders connected to their cases could be released early. The review will need to address not only the substantive criteria for release but also the communication strategy with victims, an area where past failures have carried political cost.

The devolved dimension also bears watching. Prison policy is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and justice is devolved to the Senedd (the Welsh parliament) in Wales. Burnham's remit and the scheme he has paused apply to England and Wales through the Ministry of Justice. Any tightening of release criteria in England and Wales could create divergence from approaches taken in Holyrood (the Scottish parliament) and Stormont (the Northern Ireland assembly), and the degree to which the new justice secretary coordinates across the four nations will be a measure of whether this remains a Westminster story or becomes a UK-wide one.