Housing Secretary Steve Reed was sent out on the morning media round to defend David Lammy’s calamitous handling of the migrant prison release fiasco. Unfortunately, Reed couldn’t quite clear up when exactly Lammy’s “strongest checks ever” were meant to have been put in place. He said on Sky News:
“The dates of this, that and the other… what’s important [is] that there have been hundreds of people who have been released who shouldn’t have been released because we have a paper-based system… these new checks can minimise the risk.”
A reminder that Lammy vowed on 27th October, after Hadush Kebatu’s release, that stronger checks would be “immediate.” Yet Brahim Kaddour-Cherif walked free on the 29th. Lammy later said these checks weren’t in place until after Kaddour-Cherif’s release. One convoluted explanation from Team Lammy explains that Kaddour-Cherif was marked for release many days prior to his actual exit and there was nothing that could be done post-27th…
Reed went on to admit that there will probably be more accidental prisoner releases: “For as long as we’ve got a system that is paper-based and is broken, it is likely there will be mistakes.” Meanwhile Starmer couldn’t explain what Lammy knew when, insisting yesterday that the Justice Secretary “set out the facts” on mistaken prisoner releases “to the best of his knowledge”. No wonder Cabinet colleagues have been briefing against him…
