BURNHAM’S CHILD RAPISTS ‘EARLY RELEASE’ EXCLUSION DECEIT

The Prime Minister says rapists, child sex offenders and killers have been excluded from his early release changes. What he does not tell you is that many still walk free before the sentences passed in court are finished.

PC Harper’s killers to stay in jail as PM announces early release scheme changes

Andy Burnham tells BBC Breakfast anyone convicted of manslaughter will be excluded from the early release scheme in the Sentencing Act.

BBC NewsJake Lapham

On Sunday morning the Prime Minister went on BBC Breakfast and announced that offenders convicted of unlawful killing, including manslaughter, will be excluded from the early release changes in the Sentencing Act, alongside death by dangerous and drink driving, indecent assault and historic child sexual offences. Four weeks ago he announced the same for rape and serious child sex offences.

Both were sold to the country as crackdowns. Both are deceits. Neither changed the release date these offenders already had. For offenders serving the standard sentences covered by these changes, release still comes before the sentence handed down in court has expired.

"Excluded" means they lose the new discount and keep the old one. You red that right, so read it again. "Excluded" means they lose the new discount and keep the old one.

HALFWAY RELEASE IS THE OLD SYSTEM

For years, standard determinate sentences have meant automatic release before the sentence expires. For many offenders, that meant halfway. Sixteen years passed in court has meant eight years served.

The judge announces one number for the newspapers and the Prison Service works to another.

In 2020 the release point for some serious offenders was pushed back to two thirds. Others sit at 40 or 50 per cent. That is the system as it stood.

The Sentencing Act 2026, passed by this Parliament last October and given Royal Assent in January, cuts those release points further. From 1 October, offenders on standard sentences who currently serve 40 or 50 per cent become eligible at one third. Those who currently serve two thirds become eligible at half. Life sentences and Extended Determinate Sentences sit outside these changes.

The old discount has operated for years. The new discount arrives in October. Both announcements rely on the same deceit. They treat the old release point as though it were not already early.

EXCLUDED MEANS THEY KEEP THE OLD DISCOUNT

The Government's announcement of 4 August says that offenders convicted of rape and the specified child sexual offences "will not be released any earlier than they are now."

Read those words again. The important words are not "excluded". They are "than they are now".

Nobody is promising these men will serve the sentence announced in court. The promise is only that the Sentencing Act's new reduction will not reach them. Their existing release arrangements remain. That is an exclusion from a new discount. The old discount stands.

So when Downing Street announces that child rapists are "excluded from early release," the ordinary reader hears that child rapists will serve their sentences. What they mean is that the existing release dates remain untouched. The exclusion settles which kind of early these men get. That is all it does.

THE MINISTER SAID THE MOST SERIOUS OFFENDERS WOULD BE "UNAFFECTED"

On 16 December 2025, sentencing minister Jake Richards told MPs that "those convicted of the most serious crimes will be unaffected, and will remain in prison for as long as they do now."

On 29 June this year, MPs pressed him on the fact that rapists and men convicted of offences against children could benefit from the new release points, and the contradiction was put to him directly.

That assurance did not hold. Men convicted of rape remained inside the new scheme until August. Men convicted of manslaughter remained inside it until Sunday. Each category came out only after public pressure built around it. The assurance was given before the votes. The carve-outs came after the outrage.

FIONA GODDARD WATCHED A MAN WHO ABUSED HER WALK FREE LAST WEEK

Fiona Goddard was fourteen and living in a Bradford children's home when the abuse began. Nine men were jailed at Bradford Crown Court in February 2019 for sexual offences against her. She waived her anonymity to fight for other survivors.

In June she received letters warning that her abusers could benefit from the Sentencing Act's new release points. She went on national television. Previous legislation, she said, did exempt rapists and child sex offenders, so why has this one not? In September 2024, at the peak of the prison capacity emergency, this same Government ran the SDS40 release scheme with 56 excluded offences or categories of offences, sexual offences at the top of the list. Around 2,800 prisoners went out in two tranches while the sex offenders stayed behind the door.

The Government knew how to relieve capacity without freeing rapists because it had already done it. Fourteen months later it wrote the permanent scheme and stripped the exclusions out.

In August the Prime Minister announced her exemption, and it was presented to her, and to the country, as the answer.

Survivors urge no early release for sex offenders

Grooming gang survivors say they live with the fear the “people who harmed us may come back sooner”.

BBC NewsBBC News

Mohammed Usman was jailed for 17 years in February 2019 for two counts of rape. That sentence was reduced to 15 years on appeal, which put his halfway point in August 2026. He was released last Monday, 24 August, seven and a half years in.

On Fiona's account of her calls with the Victim Liaison service, a decision is now being made on whether Naveed Aktar can transfer to an open prison with day release, ahead of his own early release in July 2027. And Fahim Iqbal, sentenced in 2019 to seven years for aiding and abetting rape, was released at half his sentence and subsequently jailed for 12 years for his role in a planned machete attack in which a 23-year-old man nearly lost his leg.

None of this breaches the exclusion. Usman could still walk out halfway through because halfway was the release date he already had. Aktar's possible move to an open prison and day release is a separate prison decision. None of the exclusions announced this summer changes either.

The state failed to protect her as a child. Years later, when she fought against a new reduction in her abusers' sentences, it deceived her with an "exclusion" that left the existing halfway release untouched. She was handed the word in August. She watched a man who abused her walk free in August. Both are true at once.

LISSIE HARPER FORCED SUNDAY'S ANNOUNCEMENT IN FOUR WEEKS

Lissie Harper, widow of PC Andrew Harper, said she was beyond appalled and bristling with anger that her husband's killers were still eligible for the new release points after the August announcement. The Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, Jason Hogg, called the omission demoralising for police officers. Four weeks later, the Prime Minister went on breakfast television and changed the policy.

What he gave her is a deceit of the same design. Her husband's killers become ineligible for the new progression release. Their existing release dates, themselves early against the sentences passed in court, stand exactly as they were. It is the same arrangement, extended to more offences.

Burnham said in August that he wanted to go further but could not without the prison system reaching capacity and collapsing. On Sunday he said the space would come from deporting hundreds of foreign prisoners and releasing inmates held on indefinite sentences. The Government's own analysis says the progression releases will still occur in tranches from October. Around 5,000 prisoners come out instead of the 6,000 first planned. One offence is removed, then another, and the underlying release scheme carries on.

THE OPPOSITION PARTIES WILL NOT SAY THE WORD HALFWAY

The shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, accused Labour of whipping its MPs through the lobby to let rapists and paedophiles out of prison early.

I genuinely like Nick Timothy. I think he is one of those rare politicians that connects with people regardless of any political loyalties they may have. But..

Where is the Conservative Party's statement explaining what "excluded" means?

One press release would do it. Show the public the Government's own wording, that excluded offenders will not be released any earlier than they are now, then explain what "now" is.

That statement does not exist because the Conservatives held the Ministry of Justice for fourteen years. Their 2020 reform moved some serious offenders to two thirds and left partway release in place for everyone else. A party that spent fourteen years running the discount cannot describe how the discount works without describing its own record.

So they attack the vote, harvest the anger, and leave the word "excluded" doing its quiet work for the Government.

Reform is the one party that can say the word halfway without indicting itself. It never ran the Ministry of Justice. It never set a release point, never signed off a discount, never wrote a release letter to a survivor. Its hands are clean on this, and clean hands are worth nothing unless they are used. So the statement Reform should issue goes further than anything the Conservatives can say.

• Mandatory minimum sentences for a named list of crimes, starting with the rape of a child, the trafficking of a child for sex, and the killing of a police officer.
• And a change in the law so that for a second named list, the sentence passed in court is the sentence served, with no automatic release at any fraction. One hundred per cent. Not two thirds, not half, not a third.

A statement like that would force Burnham to stand up and defend halfway release for child rapists in his own words, and it would force Nick Timothy to explain why fourteen years of Conservative justice ministers never proposed it.

Reform has said it will be tough on crime. Until it publishes that list, nobody knows what a Reform sentence means in years actually served, and the party is trading on the same vagueness it attacks in everyone else.

Restore has two answers, the aeroplane and the rope. Deportation deals with the offender who holds a second nationality. The death penalty deals with the offender Parliament will one day vote to hang, which is no offender at all, because no Parliament in living memory has come near that vote and Restore knows it.

Between those two answers sits every British-born man on the Bradford, Rochdale and Oldham charge sheets who cannot be flown out and will never be executed. For him Restore has no policy. It has not said what sentence he should get, what fraction he should serve, or whether the halfway discount should survive.

A party that wants to be taken seriously on the rape of children has to say what happens to the rapist it cannot deport and cannot hang, and until Restore says it, the aeroplane and the rope are headlines standing where a sentencing policy should be.

BURNHAM SOLD A DISCOUNT AS A SENTENCE

In September 2024 the Government ran SDS40 with 56 excluded offences or categories of offences, proving exclusion was possible in a capacity crisis. In October 2025 Parliament was offered amendment 24, which would have kept rapists, child sex offenders and other specified serious offenders out of the new release scheme by law. It was defeated by 307 votes to 182. In December the sentencing minister told Parliament the most serious offenders would be unaffected.

Through the summer the release letters landed and the fury built. The Prime Minister then announced exclusions that preserve the existing release arrangements for the listed offences rather than applying the new progression release points, and extended the same arrangement to unlawful killing on Sunday.

I have spent eight years watching institutions in Oldham use careful language to tell the public one thing while the paperwork says another. This is the same deceit operating from Downing Street.

"Excluded" sounds as though they stay in prison. It means only that they do not get the new discount.

Any government that believed its exclusions were worth anything would have said plainly what they do. This one is counting on nobody checking, and the people who pay for that are the survivors reading these announcements as promises.

So check. Write to your MP this week and ask two questions.

1. Do they support mandatory minimum sentences for the killers of police officers, for rapists and for those who abuse children?
2. And do they support a change in the law so that, for a named list of offences, the sentence announced in court is the sentence served, with no release at any fraction?

Ask for a yes or a no on each, in writing, and publish the reply. An MP who answers with a paragraph about capacity has answered no.

That is how it was done in Oldham. We asked the same questions of the same politicians until the answers were on the record, and a Labour government was forced to announce a national inquiry that will now investigate Labour politicians in Labour-run towns. Oldham and Bradford are on its list. The politicians who told us for years that nothing could be done are the ones it will call. They did not move because they were persuaded. They moved because we forced them.

For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.

Now the harder fight begins.

Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.

As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.

Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.

Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.

At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.

The pressure to protect a serving Prime Minister will be immense. The institutions that failed these girls will have every incentive to avoid putting the country's most powerful politician under oath. Much of the media will once again find reasons to look the other way.

That is why this campaign cannot slow down now.

For too long this has been a one man operation. It needs to become something much bigger. We need the resources to build a genuinely independent investigative organisation with:

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Raja Miah MBE