Child rapists could be among thousands of offenders to be freed early under Labour’s prison release scheme
Analysis has revealed that offenders convicted of buggery – the offence historically used to prosecute child rapists – are not among those excluded from Labour's early release scheme, despite ministers repeatedly insisting that child sex offenders would not benefit from the policy. This contradicts assurances given by justice minister Alex Davies-Jones, who said on Monday that offenders convicted of "sexual offences of a child" would be excluded, prompting accusations from the Conservatives that the government has failed to understand its own scheme.
Over the past decade there have been 431 buggery convictions, including 22 in the year to March 2026, with 251 offenders given immediate custodial sentences of the type covered by the Sentencing Act. Under the scheme, designed to ease prison overcrowding, prisoners can be freed after serving as little as a third or half of their sentence, and roughly 4,500 offenders are due to be released from next month, more than half before Christmas. Prime Minister Andy Burnham excluded some serious offences, such as manslaughter, last week, but not buggery, and separately it emerged that an NHS surgeon convicted of sexually assaulting a patient will also be eligible for release after serving half his seven-year sentence. The Ministry of Justice said it inherited prisons "on the brink of collapse" and had excluded many serious offences, but acknowledged ministers wanted to go further.
- Buggery convictions, used for historic child rape cases, aren't excluded from early release
- Ministers had claimed child sex offenders would stay in prison
- About 4,500 offenders freed early from next month under Labour's scheme
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Prisoners across England and Wales are due to be released early under a scheme introduced by Labour to relieve overcrowding in the prison system. It allows some offenders to leave custody after serving a fraction of their sentence, typically a third or half, rather than the usual point in a sentence. Ministers have said the change was needed because jails were close to running out of capacity, but they have also said certain serious and sexual offences would be kept out of the scheme.
The row centres on whether that promise has actually been kept. Buggery is an old legal term that, before more modern sexual offence laws were introduced, was used to prosecute men who raped children, alongside other non-consensual acts. Because the offence sits under an older part of the law, questions have been raised about whether it falls within the categories ministers say are excluded from early release, or whether it has been missed.
Alex Davies-Jones is the justice minister who has spoken publicly about which offenders qualify, while Andy Burnham, as prime minister, has been responsible for deciding which crimes are carved out of the scheme. The Ministry of Justice oversees prisons and sentencing policy. The issue matters because it touches on public confidence in how the justice system handles serious sexual offences against children, and on whether government reassurances about who benefits from early release can be relied upon.
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The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Supporters of the government's approach argue that it inherited a prison system genuinely on the brink of collapse, leaving ministers with an urgent operational choice between early release and a total breakdown in the justice system that would endanger everyone. They point out that many serious offences have already been excluded from the scheme, that ministers have acknowledged wanting to go further, and that offence categories such as buggery are historically broad and legally complex to carve out precisely, making swift, error-free drafting of exclusion lists genuinely difficult under time pressure. On this view, the priority must be keeping the system functioning safely overall, with refinements to exclusion lists made as problems are identified rather than the whole scheme being abandoned.
The case against
Critics argue that ministers gave explicit, repeated public assurances that child sex offenders would not benefit from early release, and that discovering buggery convictions were never actually excluded is a serious breach of that promise, not a minor technical oversight. They contend that when a policy risks freeing people convicted of raping children after serving only a third or half of their sentence, the burden must be on government to get the exclusion list right before implementation, not to correct it after public alarm and opposition scrutiny force the issue. For those who hold this view, the safety of victims and the public trust placed in ministerial assurances should never be subordinated to administrative convenience, however severe the prison capacity crisis.