Jess Phillips Voted To Let Rapists Out Early. Now She Says She Tried To Stop It

The Commons division lists, the previous release scheme and her own television interview reveal a contradiction that deserves far more scrutiny.

"It Doesn't Haunt Me"

Jess Phillips sat in a Channel 4 studio this week and admitted she always knew rapists would walk out of prison early under the bill she voted for. The clip is everywhere. The division lists aren't, so I pulled them. Her name is on both.

The clip is the least of it. Watch the full interview and you see something worse than a politician caught out.

This one came prepared. She had her story ready before she sat down. She demanded risk assessments, she says. Fought back against instant release. And she was given assurances, all sorts of them. Every piece of that defence happens behind closed doors, on her word alone.

The things we can check tell a different story.

The Vote That Cannot Be Explained Away

On 21 October last year the Conservatives put amendment 24 in front of the Commons. It would have carved rapists, paedophiles and groomers out of the early release scheme. Kieran Mullan stood up and gave Labour MPs the numbers to their faces. More than 60 per cent of criminals jailed for rape sit on standard determinate sentences. For child grooming it's over 90 per cent. He told them this amendment was the route through which they could most justifiably say no to their whips.

Division 321. Ayes 182, Noes 307. Phillips, Jess, Birmingham Yardley, in the No lobby with three hundred other Labour MPs. Exactly one Labour MP found the spine to cross.

Eight days later the whole bill came back for third reading. Mullan warned them it would come back to haunt every single one of them. Division 336. Ayes 321, Noes 103. Her name again, this time on the other side. Two lists, eight days apart, and they say everything her carefully prepared alibi is designed to bury.

Asked on Channel 4 why the Safeguarding Minister, the woman whose entire job was violence against women and girls, voted down a carve-out for rapists and groomers, her whole answer was that there is a prisons crisis.

The Prison Crisis Was Never The Excuse

Let's take that argument seriously for a moment, because nobody in that studio did. The prisons crisis is real. The Tories built it over fourteen years and left the estate with fewer than a hundred spare cells. Fine. But a prison cell is a prison cell. The scheme needed bodies out to get bodies in, and the estate is full of burglars, thieves and fraudsters whose release frees exactly the same beds. Nothing in the maths says the bed has to be emptied by a man who raped his own daughter.

Her Government Had Already Proven It Could Be Done

And here is the part I have not seen anyone else say. Her own government already proved it.

Go back to September 2024, the absolute peak of the emergency. Labour launched the SDS40 release scheme, and that scheme carried 56 excluded offence categories. Sexual offences were on it. So were domestic abuse offences. They released more than 3,000 prisoners in two months while the sex offenders stayed behind the door, so nobody can tell me the model didn't work. Phillips was a serving minister the whole time it ran.

Fourteen months on, the same government wrote the permanent version and quietly stripped the exclusions out. The line she offered Channel 4, that the bill was about sentences rather than offences and so couldn't discriminate, is contradicted by her own government's statutory instrument. They discriminated by offence in 2024 because the panic of an emergency demanded it. In 2025 they gambled nobody would notice until the letters started landing. She voted for it knowing exactly what the first scheme had proven possible.

She Chose Assurances Over The Law

Her fallback is somehow worse than the vote. She says she was given all sorts of assurances about risk assessments and victim contact, and that those assurances have not come to fruition. Think about what that sentence actually admits. A serving Home Office minister had statutory protection sitting on the order paper with a number on it. She voted it down and banked verbal promises instead. She has since described the risk assessment system she relied on as not great, one that fails victims and fails public safety. She knew the machinery was broken while she was trading women's safety against its output.

I've watched this trick for eight years. Oldham was promised an Assurance Review. These women were promised assessments. The promise is the product. Delivery was never the point.

When Victims Became A Numbers Exercise

The coldest moment of the interview has had almost no attention. Pressed on Carol Higgins, whose father got twenty years for raping her as a teenager and is now eligible to walk early, Phillips reached for arithmetic. She said she can't be asked to pick between those three women and the three women who will be raped in exactly the same way this week.

Read that again. A Safeguarding Minister just told the country the state ran a triage exercise on rape victims and some of them lost. She dresses it up as an impossible dilemma. It was never impossible. SDS40 resolved it once. Amendment 24 offered to resolve it for good. She said no, and the women now checking over their shoulders are living inside that no.

Asked whether the vote haunts her, she said it doesn't.

The Record Didn't Start With This Vote

None of this surprised me. This is the minister who resisted a national statutory inquiry into the rape gangs until the government was dragged to one. The same minister survivors urged to quit over the gagging of what they could say publicly. When she finally resigned in May she went over Starmer's leadership, and her letter boasted that real change in her brief usually came from threats made by her in light of catastrophic mistakes. She governs by private threat and public alibi. When a public lever actually existed, printed in the division record with her name against it, she left it alone.

Now, safely out of office, she wants more exemptions in the release scheme, including keeping adults who rape children inside longer. Those are the amendment 24 exemptions. They were argued to her face in October and killed with her help. The first seven hundred offenders walk in September.

And because I know my readers will ask, both Oldham MPs are on the record too. Jim McMahon voted No on amendment 24 and Aye on the bill. Debbie Abrahams didn't show for the amendment, then turned up eight days later to vote the whole thing through.

Phillips told Channel 4 she is not confident this bill will avoid creating more victims. She voted for it knowing that. The letters landing on doormats across the country are the invoice for her vote, and it has been sent to the wrong address.

I’m Raja Miah MBE. For nearly eight years, I have led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.

You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back.

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