SHADOW Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has blamed Labour’s “disastrously executed” early release scheme for the increase in prisoners being released in error.
He told GB News: “Yesterday, it would have been more appropriate if David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, had turned up to Parliament wearing a bright red nose and a big pair of clown shoes, than having to nick a poppy off a veteran sat behind him in the House of Commons.
“This is a total and utter shambles you’ve got for the second time, no, the third time now, in two weeks, convicted criminals being let out of our prisons accidentally, and now you’ve got the Metropolitan Police and Surrey Police having to waste precious resources on manhunts because of massive failures by David Lammy and the Ministry of Justice.”
Asked if this was not something new, he said: “No, this is a new issue. Look, don’t get me wrong, every single criminal who is released accidentally out of our prisons is unacceptable.
“I don’t want to see a single criminal released in this way. But something is going badly wrong that the numbers are rising dramatically. Over the last 10 years, it’s averaged about 50 criminals being released from our prisons every year. Last year, 262 it was 130% increase in a single year.
“So this has been a bad issue for a long time, but it’s got much, much worse under this Labour government. Why? Well, I don’t have all the answers, but it seems to me that the Labour government’s decision to create this early release scheme, this Get Out of Jail Free card for criminals, which has been poorly planned, disastrously executed, has led to a massive failure within the system, so that criminals are now being released left, right and centre, when they should never have been.
“What we’ve got to do now is get a grip on this. I want to see David Lammy come forward and reassure us that there are checks being put in place that will ensure this doesn’t happen, because we can’t have dangerous sex offenders on the streets of our country and the police having to rally around trying to find them.
“This man has got to be found, and he’s got to be deported as quickly as possible, and the root cause of the problem addressed, so we don’t wake up tomorrow and find that it’s happened somewhere else, at another prison and there’s another dangerous sex offender out on the streets of someone’s community.”
He added: “It’s completely, completely insane. We should never be allowing this to happen. My view is very clear, if you come here illegally, you should never be able to claim asylum at all and every single person who breaks into our country on a small boat or back of a lorry or whatever should be detained and deported.
“We should get rid of all of those human rights laws that have created the merry go round of fake claims that we’ve seen in recent years. Leave the European Convention on Human Rights, you name it, fix this problem once and for all.
“That’s why I resigned from the last Conservative government, because I was sick to my back teeth of politicians making promises, stop the boats, smash the gangs, and not keeping them.
“We can’t allow this to continue because it’s having such serious consequences for the British people, the pressure on public services, the billions of pounds that’s being wasted, the hotels that are wrecking communities, and, even more seriously, the crimes that are now being committed by some of these people who’ve come here illegally.”
