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Part one asked whether letting prisoners out early is safe, and found that nobody has checked. Part two asks the harder half: who chose this, what it costs, and what I could not pin down no matter how many documents I opened.

WHAT'S IN IT

• The plan for the next time the prisons fill up — written down, signed off, and not a plan to stop

• The steelman, read straight: the government's own best case for the Sentencing Act, in the minister's exact words

• A 2007 speech and a 2026 speech, nineteen years apart, making the same promise in nearly the same sentence

• The bill: a prison expansion portfolio of up to ten billion pounds, and the auditor's verdict on the tags everything now depends on — "Overall EM is not working as intended, creating public protection risks"

• The strangest thing I found: the law says releases start on the second of September, the government says the first of October, and as I record this no instrument has been laid to make those agree

• A named man who died after release, a coroner's report, and what the prison service wrote back

THE DOCUMENTS

Every claim in this part comes from a primary source, read first-hand:

• NAO, Increasing the capacity of the prison estate to meet demand — HC 376, 4 December 2024

• PAC, Prison estate capacity — Fifteenth Report of Session 2024-25, HC 366

• PAC, Ministry of Justice follow-up: Autumn 2025 — HC 1240, 7 January 2026

• NAO, Electronic monitoring: improving resilience to meet increasing demand — HC 266, 10 July 2026

• Hansard, Commons Oral Answers, 26 March 2024; Lords, 19 June 2007

• Jake Richards MP, Royal Assent statement, gov.uk, 22 January 2026

• The Sentencing Act 2026 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations, SI 2026/609

• MoJ, Prison population projections 2025 to 2030, December 2025

• Commons Library, The End of Custody Licence, SN/HA/4851

• Prevention of Future Deaths report ref 2026-0038, and the HMPPS response

House of Commons Library, Changes to automatic prisoner release dates, CBP-10974:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10974/

CORRECTIONS

Every figure was re-derived from the source before recording, and the ones that changed are logged. If anything here is wrong, tell me and I will say so on air.

News Over Tea. Different story, same method. I find the document, and I read you the bit nobody quoted.