Andy Burnham has put planned changes to prisoner release dates on hold, after it emerged two men convicted of killing PC Andrew Harper could have benefited from them.
The reforms were due to kick in across England and Wales on 2 September, potentially shifting the release dates of thousands of prisoners already serving standard sentences. Burnham has now told the Ministry of Justice to stop rolling it out while an urgent review takes place.
“Keeping the public safe will always be my top priority,” the prime minister said. “I am working closely with the new justice secretary and have instructed my team to put a pause on the changes that were due to start in September. No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to minimise risk to the public. Where changes are needed, we will not hesitate to make them.”
Keeping the public safe will always be my top priority.
I have instructed my team to put a pause on the sentencing changes that were due to start in September.
No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to…
— Andy Burnham (@andyburnham) July 23, 2026
This all followed a genuinely emotional intervention from PC Harper’s widow, Lissie, who called the possibility of his killers being released early “deplorable.” It also leaves Burnham’s government stuck with the exact problem this policy was meant to solve in the first place: prisons running dangerously close to full, with almost no time left to find a different answer.
What happened to PC Andrew Harper
PC Harper was responding to a stolen quad bike in Sulhamstead, Berkshire, in August 2019 when he got caught in a strap attached to the back of the getaway vehicle. He was 28. He was dragged for more than a mile and died from his injuries.
Henry Long, who was driving, got 16 years after admitting manslaughter. Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, both passengers, were convicted of manslaughter at trial and got 13 years each. All three were cleared of murder.
Long wouldn’t have qualified for early release under the September changes. Cole and Bowers, though, could have had their release point shift from two-thirds of their sentence down to halfway, which is exactly what triggered this whole row.
‘It has taken me years to rebuild a life’
Lissie Harper said the policy risked reopening wounds that had never fully closed. “It has taken me years to rebuild a life that was torn apart in a matter of moments,” she said. “Years to pick up the pieces left behind by three men whose actions robbed Andrew of his life and stole our future. Now, once again, politicians are making decisions from behind a desk that will have real and lasting consequences for victims’ families like mine.”
She called it “deplorable” that early release for the men had even been on the table. “We speak of justice, accountability and standing with victims, yet decisions like this do the opposite,” she added.
PC Harper’s mother, Debbie Adlam, also condemned the prospect of Cole and Bowers serving only half their sentences, calling it an insult to her son’s memory. Thames Valley Police chief constable Jason Hogg said it “feels wrong” that the men could end up spending less time inside than anyone expected at sentencing.
That combination of objections put Burnham under real pressure to act, just days into the job.
Why Harper’s Law didn’t apply here
After PC Harper’s death, his family campaigned successfully for a change in the law requiring mandatory life sentences for anyone convicted of killing an emergency worker while committing a crime. Harper’s Law came into force in June 2022, covering offences including manslaughter where the victim was an emergency worker doing their job.
Had the three men been convicted under today’s version of the law, they could have received life sentences. But it wasn’t in force when they were convicted, and it doesn’t apply retrospectively, so their original sentences stayed as they were. That’s long frustrated PC Harper’s family, and the prospect of early release for two of the men only reinforced their feeling that the punishment never really matched what actually happened.
What the paused policy would actually have done
These reforms were passed under Keir Starmer’s government, part of the Sentencing Act, following recommendations from former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review. The idea was to replace the constant stream of emergency early-release measures with something more permanent that could keep prison numbers under control long-term.
Under the new system, some people serving standard sentences could become eligible for release after just a third of their time, provided they met behavioural requirements. People convicted of more serious violent and sexual offences, who’d otherwise serve two-thirds before release, could become eligible at the halfway mark instead.
Release wasn’t meant to mean the rest of the sentence just vanished, people leaving early would stay on licence, potentially with electronic monitoring, and could be recalled to prison if they breached conditions. Life sentences, IPP sentences and extended determinate sentences were all excluded, and the government said over 18,000 people serving more serious sentence types would stay in for exactly as long as under the current rules.
The row happened because this scheme didn’t carry the same broad, offence-based exclusions used in some earlier emergency measures. It was based more on sentence type and individual eligibility than a blanket ban tied to the label of the crime, which meant people convicted of manslaughter, domestic abuse, and some serious sexual or violent offences could, in principle, still qualify.
Thousands of victims had already been told
Preparations for the September rollout were well underway. The Ministry of Justice says over 8,200 victims registered with the Probation Service’s Victim Contact Scheme had already been notified about the changes by 1 July. That’s not 8,200 individual prisoners, some offenders have multiple registered victims, and not everyone who got a letter would necessarily have seen an actual change to release dates. Victim liaison officers were expecting to follow up again once individual sentences got recalculated.
The pause creates fresh uncertainty for victims, prisoners and probation staff who’d already been preparing for the new dates. Unions representing probation officers have warned that last-minute changes like this could cause real operational headaches, especially if staff now have to unwind work they’d already done.
This isn’t the first time early release has caused a stir
The capacity crisis behind all of this didn’t start with the Sentencing Act. The previous Conservative government brought in the End of Custody Supervised Licence scheme back in October 2023, letting eligible prisoners out anywhere from 18 to 70 days early to stop jails running out of space entirely. More than 10,000 people were released under that scheme before it ended in September 2024.
Labour then brought in SDS40 shortly after winning the election, moving the automatic release point for eligible standard sentences from 50% down to 40%. More than 16,000 people were released under SDS40 between September and the end of December 2024 alone, with further releases continuing through 2025. Streeting and Mahmood recently got caught on a hot mic joking about this exact tension, between the departments responsible for locking people up and letting them out, a clip that landed particularly badly given how sensitive this whole subject already was, and given how directly it connected back to the same Harper case.
SDS40 excluded certain categories too, including many convicted of sexual, violent and domestic abuse offences. The Sentencing Act reforms were meant to be a longer-term fix, so governments wouldn’t have to keep reaching for emergency releases every time the prison estate got close to bursting.
Why any of this was ever necessary
When Labour took over in 2024, prison capacity was genuinely close to running out entirely. Shabana Mahmood, justice secretary at the time, warned that running out of cell space could mean “a total breakdown of law and order,” with police potentially unable to make arrests and courts struggling to hand down custodial sentences at all, simply because there’d be nowhere left to put anyone.
Building new prisons takes years and costs a fortune, and successive governments have consistently failed to build fast enough to keep pace with a growing prison population and longer average sentences. The Gauke review’s conclusion was blunt: ministers needed to actually reduce the number of people in custody, or keep facing the same emergency-release cycle every time capacity ran short.
Pausing the September reforms doesn’t make any of that pressure disappear. It buys Burnham time to rethink who should actually qualify, but it also narrows his government’s options just as the prison population keeps climbing.
What happens now
The review will look at whether extra safeguards or exclusions are needed, particularly around manslaughter, serious violence, sexual offences and domestic abuse. Burnham had initially said he couldn’t promise to scrap the policy outright, only that he wanted “everything looked at” before it went live. This latest, firmer announcement goes further: nobody will be released under the new Sentencing Act arrangements at all while the review is ongoing.
Existing release rules and schemes carry on as normal unless separately changed, this pause is specifically about the reforms due to start in September, not every prisoner release or everyone already nearing the end of their sentence under current law.
Burnham now has to find a way through this that actually satisfies PC Harper’s family’s concerns without letting the prison system slide back to the edge of collapse. The pause buys him some breathing room. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem that made ministers consider earlier releases in the first place.
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