Dominic Casciani

speaker

321 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Aug

Dominic Casciani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Newscast · Andy Burnham Pauses Prison Early Release Plan · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

Now, unpacking that in policy legal terms, that means the first thing they've got to do is use their ministerial powers to basically scrap

the timetable which is in place.

And that was signed by Lord Timpson, the outgoing prisons minister, in June.

So that will have to be lifted, one imagines, unless they decide at the end of the day to go ahead with that programme.

And that schedule, that phased introduction of these early releases, starts on the 2nd of September.

So the question is, are they going to scrap that 2nd of September date, or are they going to keep it or change some of the other dates?

The problem they've got then is they've got prison governors who are going to be tearing their hair out, metaphorically speaking, because they'll say the numbers are going to start creeping up and we're going to run out of cells again.

That's their concern.

And the entire programme, and this all goes back to Shabana Mahmood when she was Justice Secretary, the whole thing has been designed very, very carefully to avoid a series of peaks in

in the prison population where they would potentially run out of cells before all the new prison capacity comes online with big frantic building programme going on all around England and Wales to create new spaces.

So there's a real...

To use a football commentator analogy, there's a real squeaky bum time here come the autumn, because if they pause this scheme and they're not shifting people out of prison fast enough, then they could run out of cells.

And that's a position no government wants to be in.

And this government, or at least the Starmer government, said they would never be in that position again.

That's right.

There's another dimension to this as well, Adam, which is whether or not these early releases are going to work in terms of the way the government has effectively presented these reforms.

Shabana Mahmood, when she started pushing this through the House before she was reshuffled to the Home Office, said this was really about creating prison outside of prison.

And what she meant by that was that you can control people's lives, you can control what offenders do without putting them behind the bars.

of of a jail and you're basically leaning into using a lot of technology there electronic tagging really really careful uh use of curfews and monitoring by probation and that's the problem there is the monitoring by probation because no end of parliamentary parliamentary reports have warned that the probation service isn't in a fit state to to manage all of these risks and that's not criticism of the individual officers this is simply a function of the fact that they they've been really really quite hit by

A constant revolution over about a decade.

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