The accidental release of a migrant sex offender from prison is a sign that the UK justice system is “broken”, a minister has said. Steve Reed called for the criminal justice system to be “rebuilt from the bottom up” after the mistaken release of Hadush Kebatu, who was imprisoned for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
The Ethiopian national was jailed for 12 months in September for the offence and was wrongly freed from HMP Chelmsford on Friday morning instead of being sent to an immigration detention centre, sparking widespread condemnation.
Speaking to Sky News on Monday, the housing secretary said: “This individual had no right to be in the country in the first place, let alone committing the kind of offences that he committed.
“I’m sure everybody else watching was just as shocked when they saw this individual had been released accidentally. It wasn’t that he made an escape bid: he was released in a way that should not have happened. Now, that is a sign, isn’t it, of a broken criminal justice system.”
Blaming the debacle on the previous Tory government, Mr Reed said: “But we know that, because when we were elected, the prisons were full up. There wasn’t room to house people who have got custodial sentences in the courts. One third of professional staff in the criminal justice system have been got rid of under the previous government. We’re having to rebuild it from the bottom up.”
The UK’s prisons are already in crisis and face issues of overcrowding. The Independent revealed this month that conditions are worse than ever, with a soaring maintenance backlog approaching £2bn, having doubled from 2020 to 2024.
A quarter of prisoners in England and Wales are locked in jails which are not fire safe, while hundreds are held in cells without toilets and forced to defecate in buckets and bags if there are not enough staff to let them out to use the toilet overnight.
Following the latest debacle, Charlie Taylor, chief inspector of prisons, warned on Monday that changes to visa rules coming into force in the new year will have an “enormously damaging” effect on prison staffing levels, which are already overstretched.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There are a large number of West African prison officers, on which many prisoners are reliant, who are in danger of having their visas revoked because of changes in the policy in the Home Office and that is going to have an enormously damaging effect to some prisons. There are a number of prisons that are going to lose so many officers that they’re going to be very difficult to run.”
Mr Taylor added that he had yet to see details of extra checks that prison governors have been ordered to undertake when inmates are freed.
He said: “I haven’t actually seen the checklist itself. I can absolutely understand that ministers are furious about this case and want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Is it proportionate? Well, we’ll have to look at the checklist over the course of this week.”
Justice secretary David Lammy will set out a series of measures aimed at strengthening the system as he faces questions about the blunder from MPs in parliament.
Kebatu, who had been living at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, when he sexually assaulted the girl, travelled to London after being released from HMP Chelmsford and was arrested on Sunday morning in Finsbury Park after a two-day manhunt.
The father of Kebatu’s teenage victim said he hopes the sex offender will be “deported immediately” – which the justice secretary said should happen this coming week.
Mr Reed told broadcasters on Monday morning that he shared their “frustration and fury” and pledged to announce an independent inquiry into what happened in parliament on Monday.
According to government figures published in July, 262 prisoners were released in error in the year to March 2025 – a 128 per cent increase on 115 the previous 12 months.
But Mr Reed insisted there had been no change in policy under Labour that led to the rise. By Tara Cobham, The Independent