UK government under fire for rising mistaken prisoner releases

The accidental release of Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu last month compounded the pressure on the government which is struggling with overcrowded prisons and a broken immigration system.

His arrest in July already triggered protests outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Epping, north of London, which then became a touch-paper for wider anti-immigration demonstrations. He was deported following a three-day manhunt.

This week, two more mistaken prisoner releases – including an Algerian national on the sex offenders register who had overstayed his visa – have raised further concerns about the prison system, which has been grappling with overcrowding after the number of inmates in England and Wales doubled in the last 30 years.

The government estimates that 262 prisoners were released mistakenly in the 12 months to March 2025 – marking the fourth consecutive year of increase and more than double the 115 reported the previous year.

“The system is in utter chaos,” Alex Davies-Jones, a minister in the justice department, told Times Radio.

“We are deporting more foreign prisoners than ever before,” she said. “We’re also going to be deporting them on sentencing, rather than waiting for them to serve time in our prisons.”

The accidental releases have also increased pressure on David Lammy, Britain’s justice minister and deputy prime minister, who told parliament on Wednesday that he had toughened the rules to fix the problem, without revealing that he had known about the recent mistakes.

Davies-Jones blamed the crisis on 14 years of “chronic austerity and underfunding in our public services”, as well as the failure to build more prisons, under the previous Conservative government.