Hundreds of prisoners are due to be released early from jail on Thursday amid warnings that many will have nowhere to live and the probation system will struggle to monitor them.
About 2,000 criminals including domestic abusers and violent offenders are to be freed over the next month, with another 3,000 in stages over the next year to ease overcrowding. The number was reduced from 6,000 after an intervention by the prime minister, Andy Burnham.
Prisoners are supposed to be found appropriate accommodation before their release, significantly reducing reoffending rates.
But a probation source told the Guardian that their colleagues in some towns and cities were struggling to find hostel places.
“We have a handful of places for ex-offenders and they are full. We are now looking at releasing some people straight on to the street,” the source said.
Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the social justice charity Nacro, said: “We know that leaving prison homeless can put people on a path back into custody. It is vital that the whole system from prisons and probation to councils and community providers work together to give people a roof over their heads.”
Napo, the probation officers’ union, has raised the issue of the accommodation shortage with prison bosses. The task of finding beds for prisoners is expected to reach critical levels from 13 October, when a second tranche of prisoners is due for release.
Ben Cockburn, the union’s national chair, said HM Prison Service seemed to be in “absolute denial” about the state of the Probation Service.
“We have massive staff shortages, unsustainable and dangerously high workloads and electronic monitoring is failing to deliver,” he said.
Ministers say the expanded early release scheme is needed to prevent the collapse of the criminal justice system. They say the Conservatives in their time in power added too few prison places while increasing the length of sentences.
Criminals will be excluded from the scheme if they have been jailed in child grooming gang cases or convicted of indecent assault. Those guilty of manslaughter will also be excluded, meaning the killers of Andrew Harper, a police officer who died in the line of duty in 2019, will not be eligible.
The releases will take place across dozens of prisons across England and Wales from Thursday.
The expansion of the scheme is happening as a result of the 2026 Sentencing Act, which allows ministers to reduce the point at which certain prisoners can be freed from 40% of a fixed-term sentence to a third.
Several hundred people are likely to be released on 1 October as part of the first phase of the expanded scheme, with more to follow in subsequent months.
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The Ministry of Justice says it is launching the biggest ever expansion of electronic monitoring, with a new presumption that offenders will be electronically tagged and monitored when they leave prison.
But a report released this week by probation and police watchdogs warned that some criminals were waiting up to five months to be fitted with a tag, leading to repeated breaches of court and prison orders.
Only 55% of GPS and radio frequency tags were fitted on time, according to the report’s findings. The figure was 60% for alcohol monitoring tags.
Keir Starmer’s government launched an early release scheme in September 2024, months after the general election. Images of prisoners swigging champagne, being driven away in sports cars and thanking the then prime minister were seized upon by the government’s critics.
Figures show the number of people behind bars has jumped by more than 1,700 in the past three months. The prison population of England and Wales stood at 87,499 on Monday, according to weekly government data.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This government inherited prisons on the brink of collapse and a homelessness crisis, with rough sleeping more than doubling since 2010.
“We’re pulling every lever to fix this, building 14,000 new prison places and working with councils and charities to halve prison leaver homelessness by 2029, supported by a record £700m investment in probation and community services.”
