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The justice secretary has revealed that 91 prisoners have been released by mistake in England and Wales since April, of whom as many four remain at large.
David Lammy gave details in a Commons statement of three mistakenly released prisoners the police are trying to trace. He said the Prison Service was also investigating a fourth inmate released in error last Monday who may still be at large.
The shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, mocked Lammy for not knowing how many remain at large. “The justice secretary is so clueless, he’s literally lost track of how many prisoners he’s lost,” he told MPs.
“He says today a prisoner may have been accidentally released last Monday. Well, has he looked? He’s either in his cell or he’s not. What a complete and utter farce he’s presiding over.
“The public are being endangered as this circus rumbles on week after week, with no end in sight.”
Lammy blamed cuts under previous Conservative governments for the mistakes, and invited Jenrick to join him in apologising for the errors.
“Frontline prison officers were cut by a quarter between 2010 and 2017,” he said. “That’s around 6,000 fewer people and means that there are less experienced staff, which places more pressure on the system. Unsurprisingly, mistakes happen in those circumstances.”
He confirmed that 262 prisoners had been freed in error in the year to March 2025 out of 57,000 releases, a 128% rise on the previous year. “New data my department published today shows that from April to the end of October this year, there were 91 releases in error from prison,” he said.
A No 10 spokesperson said the numbers were “symptomatic of a system that the government inherited, of a prison system under severe strain, a failing criminal justice system”.
“The public are right to be shocked by these cases. While they are rare, they have been rising year-on-year from an average of nine per month in 2023 to 17 per month the next year.
“And we’re clear that you can’t fix the prisons crisis overnight, but we have taken immediate action, including tougher new release checks, calling in prison governors, sending in tech experts.”
Lammy said the release process required a radical overhaul. He outlined measures including the establishment of a justice performance board that he will chair each month and a £10m AI scheme to “help frontline staff avoid mistakes and support them to calculate sentences accurately”.
Of the three prisoners known to be at large after being released in error none were sex offenders, he said.
A class B drug offender was freed in August 2024, someone who failed to surrender to the police was freed in December 2024 and a prisoner convicted of aggravated burglary was freed in June 2025, he said.
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Two were British and one a foreign national, he added.
Lammy’s Commons statement came after Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, an Algerian sex offender, and Billy Smith, a fraudster, were accidentally freed from HMP Wandsworth. Smith handed himself in and police caught Kaddour-Cherif last week.
The errors came days after Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian national, was mistakenly freed from HMP Chelmsford despite his conviction for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman days after arriving in the UK on a small boat.
Lammy confirmed that the error leading to Kaddour-Cherif’s release had happened in September, before tougher security checks were introduced.
He has faced criticism over his handling of the latest release in error after he repeatedly refused to confirm at prime minister’s questions whether any more asylum seekers had been wrongly released since Kebatu.
Lammy said he had found out about the mistake on Wednesday morning, but the detail was released just after he had finished PMQs.
