Prime Minister's dilemma on early release of prisoners

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0:30Designed by She's Birdie for hotels, dorms, Airbnbs, and anywhere you're staying away from home. It installs in seconds on the doorframe, and if the door is opened, it activates a loud siren and flashing strobe to help draw attention instantly. She's Birdie. Because peace of mind should check in with you. Birdie Box by She's Birdie. Visit She's Birdie.com. That's S-H-E-S-B-I-R-D-I-E dot com. And order your Birdie Box before your next stay away from home. Hello, I'm Julian Warwicker. Thank you for downloading the BBC World Tonight podcast for Tuesday 11th August. The dilemma facing Andy Burnham over the early release of some prisoners as the pressure grows on him not to allow the killers of PC Andrew Harper to be eligible for release next year.

1:19What are the Prime Minister's options and what are the legal implications of any last-minute change of policy? President Trump flew back from the NATO summit in Ankara last month in a decoy plane, unbeknownst to journalists on Air Force One. We hear from an historian who says this is unprecedented. And images from the famous Abbey Road studios, some of the photography which has captured musical history. Well, the message from Downing Street yesterday seemed clear on the controversial issue of prison releases. It was not possible, they said, to exempt one or two offenders convicted of manslaughter from the early release scheme.

1:57That was taken as near confirmation that the two killers of PC Andrew Harper, Jesse Cole and Albert Bowers, would be eligible for release from jail next year after serving half of their 13-year sentences for manslaughter. And that's despite the public outcry about the possibility of their release and moving comments made by PC Harper's mother, Debbie Adlam. But then today, Andy Burnham seemed to say something slightly different. He was, he said, increasingly confident that the government can free up space in overcrowded prisons in England and Wales to prevent the early release of the, quote, most serious offenders.

2:36You'll hear more about the political dilemma faced by the Prime Minister in a moment. But first, a legal perspective. Professor Nikki Patfield was one of a small group who advised the former Justice Secretary David Gork on his Independent Sentencing Review of 2025. That formed the basis of the Sentencing Act, which allowed for the early release of prisoners to help manage overcrowded prisons. Before she retired, she headed the University of Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice. I asked her whether the Gork Review, as it's known, had looked at the possibility of exemptions for early release and, if so, how they were considered.

3:17Well, there was great discussion and, indeed, we looked at lots of different categories of offenders. You can decide on early release on the basis of sentence lengths or offence categories. Many people are sentenced for more than one offence at the time and again the system gets more and more complicated. But now we've certainly looked at all sorts of different groups. And how difficult is it to carve out exemptions? Well, the law can be passed which says anything. I think the Gawke Review was very keen to argue that there should be consistency, transparency, that we should be able to know in advance what a sentence meant.

4:08And of course, the more exemptions you have, the more complicated it gets. If we get to the point, and we might, where there is a legal exemption to keep the two killers of PC Harper in jail for more of their sentence than the system would currently suggest, what might the impact of that be in terms of other cases which might look very similar to the loved ones of those who have been killed in those other cases. Well, I'm quite sure that that is the debate that is happening behind closed doors within the Ministry of Justice and elsewhere. The more exemptions you have, the more you will have frustrated and angry people.

4:53And I'm sure that everybody who's trying to draw up new rules is very aware of that. I mean, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I mean, are we talking about potentially a sort of slippery slope scenario here where for perhaps perfectly good reasons and because of a public calling for it, you change it once and you will then feel obliged to change it again and again? They're enormous questions, aren't they? And I would want to make them even larger in the sense that who should decide who gets early release? Should it be executive decree? Should it be a parole board? Should it be judicial enforcement courts?

5:32None of these are straightforward questions. Are you worried at the moment that public opinion is leading the way in terms of possible outcomes here? It all depends what you mean by public opinion. The law should not be forced through by those whose voice is the loudest, of course not. But I think the level of discontent at this moment shows that there is very serious public unhappiness. If the government takes that on board, that has to be a good thing. But it doesn't mean that the answer is easy, that the public, inverted commas, can decide the appropriate sentence in individual cases. There are more complicated factors at play, which include questions of rehabilitation.

6:23One senses at the moment a prime minister facing a genuine dilemma. If you had the chance to advise him, what would you say? Go and visit some prisons, see the state that they're in at the moment, visit some probation officers, talk to many people and understand that knee-jerk solutions will not solve the problems long term. And say what to the public as you do that? Well, I'm not a politician and Andy Burnham is. And I think he is much cleverer than I am at finding the words to say that I am looking into this subject and we want to make it much better for everyone. Victims are very unhappy that they think that their offenders may be coming out at dates that they weren't anticipating.

7:17But equally for people in prison, the levels of uncertainty must be pretty unbearable. Which takes me to a final observation as to whether we're looking at a situation where there is a tension between good politics and good policy. And it's a very difficult tension to resolve. Yes. What a wonderful point you make. The more I watch the system, the more I realise the complexity of the relationship between politicians and policy makers. It's a very, very complicated world. Professor Nikki Patfield. Well, on that dilemma now faced by the Prime Minister, I spoke earlier to our political correspondent Alex Forsyth.

7:57What does she read into the way Mr Burnham is dealing with it? Well, it's interesting because I think right from the very beginning, when Andy Burnham was first asked about, in particular, the two killers of PC Harper, he made it pretty clear that he wanted to do something about it. The struggle then came when he butted up against the reality of the stresses on the prison system and this issue with overcrowding. And so we had the sort of prime minister saying he was going to pause, he was going to review the early release scheme. And then we got some pretty clear messages, particularly in the past week from senior ministers and from Downing Street, that really suggested that while they had made some extra exemptions to those offenders who might be eligible for early release, they couldn't go much further, particularly the suggestion was when it came to these two particular individuals involved in the killing of PC Andrew Harper.

8:48So right up until that point, the sort of signal was, look, I want to go further from the Prime Minister, but I can't until really today when he said, you know, OK, I'm going to look at other options and attempt to come up with this plan. So I think his desire was abundantly clear, but how you manage that then in the context of the reality of the strains on the prison and wider justice system was where it became difficult. Could he live to regret his handling of all of this, do you think? Well, I think what's interesting now is we are waiting again to see what the Justice Secretary comes up with when they come forward with this plan to try and free up prison spaces.

9:26we know some of the areas the Prime Minister said they're going to look at so the use of the female estate, foreign national offenders those on indefinite sentences for public protection but I think again part of the challenge is that he's going to face difficult choices wherever he turns because there is that pressure in the prison system and a pretty well rehearsed debate about how many prison places should have been built can they be built quickly enough but until all of that is resolved he's still going to face these choices and interestingly in the last couple of hours There's been a letter put out by the National Police Chiefs Council signed on behalf of 50 senior police chiefs.

10:01So that's chief constables, acting chief constables. And they're welcoming the prime minister's intervention today, particularly around these two killers of PC Andrew Harper. But they're also setting out a series of things they would like to see from the government when it comes to the early release of other offenders. So they're talking about the impact on victims, on public safety, on victim confidence and wider confidence in the criminal justice system, saying things like, you know, victims and bereaved families must be considered when changes are made to sentencing or release arrangements.

10:29And I think that just shows whatever avenue the Prime Minister chooses to take from here on in could then face further questions about the impact on individuals. Alex Forsyth, coming up later. It is the soundtrack to our lives. So Abbey Road at the centre of a very large web that goes out into the world. But they're a fundamental, you know, piece of our culture.

10:57An archive on Abbey Road, I take a walk through a photography exhibition about the studios which made some of Britain's biggest recording artists. Now, a judge at the Old Bailey will tomorrow pass sentence on 40-year-old Simon Levy. He was convicted last week of raping one woman and of murdering two others, Carmenza Valencia Trujillo and Cheryl Wilkins, in London last year. During his trial, jurors heard Levy had a string of convictions for attacking women dating back to July 2018, including one carried out against a prison officer in 2022. The Metropolitan Police, the British Transport Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have all admitted failings in how they dealt with Levy, who was on bail as his attacks on women escalated to double murder.

11:48Our investigations correspondent, Daniel DeSimone, has been following the case throughout and he's been speaking to one of Levy's victims who's waived her right to anonymity to speak out. Laura says she wants to see change in how male violence against women is dealt with by the police and the authorities. He told me what happened to her. Well, Laura, that's her real name, we're just not using her surname. She was sexually assaulted by Simon Levy in 2018 in London and she was going to the Notting Hill Carnival that summer. He latched onto her and a friend of hers on the train, followed them around and then launched a really serious sexual assault on her.

12:28She was incredibly distressed. She got away from Levy. He followed her and her friend around the carnival. Eventually she got him chased off by some men and then she tried to report it to two Met officers who turned her away and then a third Met officer eventually took her details but didn't actually provide any more support or do any more and she felt like that just wasn't enough, that enough wasn't done to help her that night. I was hysterical. All I remember is crying and my friend was trying to make sense of what had gone on. There was a lot more things they could have done to make me feel supported and to feel like it was OK to tell them what had happened.

13:08And also, they had the opportunity to go and look for that guy around Carnival when I was trying to tell them what he looked like, what he was wearing. They gave him the opportunity to change his clothes, go off into the crowd, do whatever, because no one listened to what I was. So how many other women did he touch that day? We don't know. She was then contacted a few days later by the police. She gave a statement a few days after that. And eventually, Levy was taken to court three years later and jailed for sexually assaulting her and another woman in a separate attack. Both those attacks in 2018.

13:42And he was then jailed for three years. And what happened once Levy was released from prison following his assault of Laura? Well, while he was in prison, he actually sexually assaulted a prison officer. And then when he was released, really, we then get into an absolute catalogue of failings by the police, by the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service and by British Transport Police. Because Levy embarked on a campaign of sexual violence and violence against women in London. Basically, he was downgraded as a risk to women by the Met Police, who were meant to be monitoring him at the time. There were multiple allegations against him.

14:19The police did not pursue those properly. He then began sexually assaulting women on the London Underground, very overtly in front of people. He was arrested, then he was repeatedly bailed, first by the police, then by the courts, even after having been charged. and then he launched very violent attacks on three women who he encountered in London who were working as sex workers. He raped one, extremely violently left her for dead. The Met didn't investigate that properly. They closed their investigation when they could have identified him. He then murdered a woman called Carmenza Valencia Trujillo.

14:55The Met didn't even treat that as a murder despite having his DNA on her. They arrested him, released him, didn't treat it as a murder and then he went on to murder a second victim later that year. It was only then that he was taken off the streets after he had attacked 14 women and he could have been stopped at the beginning. So when I've been speaking to Laura about this, she feels like the police, the authorities, knew what he was about after what he'd done to her and that they should have protected other women and that she felt like she did her part by going to court and getting him jailed and she feels betrayed by the authorities for what he was then allowed to do.

15:31I feel like when I reported it, I was doing the right thing. And I thought I was doing it to protect other women from someone like that. I feel absolutely devastated for all of those women that have been affected by him and the families. I just, I feel really let down by the police. I feel really disappointed. Not just the police, the judges that were involved that kept bailing him out, the CPS. all of them, they're all as guilty for allowing him to continue to do what he was doing. And following Levy's convictions last week for two murders and raping a third woman, the Met has said that admitted failings, except that the life of the second murder victim could have been saved.

16:15There's been failings admitted by British Transport Police, also by the Crown Prosecution Service, which has apologised. And what did Laura say about the record of the police in this case? Well, she's incredibly damning. She just says he should never have been allowed to behave as he did. Both women's lives could have been saved. So many more women could have been saved from being attacked. And she says she feels let down and that she used to have nightmares about him. And she used to worry about where he might be. She used to not go on trains because she thought he'd be on trains. And she says that actually now knowing what happened, it's like what she was dreaming, what she was having nightmares about was actually something was happening in reality.

16:56He's evil. My instincts were right. My instincts not to go and get on trains have always been right then because I just think to myself, he's been roaming loose. It's almost like my nightmare is in real life. Like, if you can pluck it out of my head and he's walking, that's what's happening. And Levy is going to be sentenced tomorrow for the two murders and for raping the third victim. This is a really big case for the mayor. It's one of those cases where it really illuminates the entire criminal justice system. You can see how it simply fails to stop male violence against women, even when the perpetrator is on the radar.

17:36He's being monitored and he's even been charged. He keeps doing it. And so it's really a major case. And it comes at a time when government police say this kind of male violence is like a priority area. And yet it was still allowed to happen in really recent times. You know, this happened last year in London. Our investigations correspondent, Daniel de Simone, and that sentencing taking place tomorrow. When President Trump left the NATO summit in the Turkish capital Ankara last month, he did so in an apparently routine fashion. He climbed the steps up to the door of Air Force One, turned and waved, and then went inside.

18:13However, he didn't stay on board for long. It's now emerged that on the other side of the plane, away from onlookers or photographers, as a catering van was parked up, ostensibly to deliver food and drinks for the flight. What it actually did was provide an exit opportunity for the president, who, for security reasons, got into the van and was taken across to a military jet. That's how he then flew out of Turkey. The reason for all this subterfuse was a possible Iranian threat. Officials have since told the BBC's US partner CBS News that there had been a credible threat of an Iranian missile being fired at Air Force One.

18:52Well, questions naturally have arisen about whether the journalists left on board Air Force One were essentially treated as a decoy. Here's Paul Eklhoff, a former US Secret Service agent, speaking to Paul Henley on the BBC's NewsHour programme. If the reporting is accurate, those journalists weren't left sitting in an unprotected airplane somewhere. They were aboard Air Force One, one of the most sophisticated and protected aircraft in the world. Which was seen at the time as enough of a target for the president to have to be removed from it. The Washington Post, which reported this story, is today saying that this security thing crossed a line.

19:29It was putting journalists in danger. They were left on a potentially more secure aircraft. Could separating the president from the aircraft have changed the threat calculus? I mean, of course. But the Secret Service's responsibility in that moment is to protect the President of the United States and preserve continuity of government. I don't believe it was that the press was put in more danger at all. Well, Garrett Graff is an American journalist and historian and a former editor of Politico magazine. So what did he make of the events at Ankara Airport? As far as I can tell, and I have studied presidential travel pretty well going back decades, it is effectively unprecedented.

20:11And what I mean by that is there are two different things that are different about this. The first is that no one has been able to come up with an example of when the press itself was kept in the dark about the president's whereabouts during an international travel like this. And that there are parts of this security procedure that are normal, including the use of decoy planes, sometimes traveling into war zones in unmarked cargo planes or unmarked other smaller jets. But in all of those previous instances, the press has been briefed on that in advance and has known the president's sort of whereabouts and attempt at travel.

21:06The second thing that is unprecedented about this is the fact that the White House has continued to keep this a secret since the conclusion of the trip. There have been instances, for instance, when President Clinton traveled to Pakistan in 2000, when he traveled on a decoy jet and the press wasn't aware of which specific decoy jet he was on, but knew that he was on one. There have been times in the past where the White House press corps has been misled due to security concerns about the whereabouts of the president. When President Biden actually traveled to Ukraine, the normal White House press pool who were on duty at that moment thought that he was still in Washington, that they were in the dark.

22:03But the White House had actually set up a separate press corps who traveled with the president under the cloak of secrecy and were with him at all times. This time, though, there was no press corps who was read into the security concerns and nature of this decoy. And you can imagine all of the different ways that that could have gone wrong in a situation where something had happened either to the plane where the press actually were where they thought the president was, or if something had gone wrong on the plane that the president actually was on but the press didn't know. I mean, I'm just thinking on board Air Force One, there are therefore journalists there who don't know that there was considered to be a significant enough threat to that plane for the president to not fly on it.

22:59The idea that the press was going to be used as a decoy unwittingly is certainly not a great sign of the relationship between the White House and the press corps. But to me, the more fundamental problem with this is that it misunderstands the point of the White House press corps, which is that press pool follows the president at all times, is always with the president, because the status and whereabouts of the president of the United States is an incredibly important national security and geopolitical issue. And, you know, it's knowing where the president is, knowing whether he is safe or in danger is the type of thing that provokes instant world instability and financial crisis.

23:54So if something had happened to the president while he was on that other plane, there wouldn't have been the normal group of journalists to tell the world that that had happened. And in fact, you would have had the opposite, which is you would have had a White House press pool, none the wiser, who would have believed and been telling the world that the president was OK. And you can think about what a crisis that would have provoked not knowing whether the president of the United States was safe or in control of the U.S. government and nuclear forces. Garrett Graff, American journalist and historian.

24:38Now, the world-renowned music recording studios at Abbey Road in London date back more than 90 years. Previously a nine-bedroom house, the building was bought in 1929, completely refitted, and then opened two years later. Since then, its various recording spaces have played host to many of music's most iconic performers, with the Beatles recording 190 of their 210 songs there between 1962 and 1970. The studios are self-evidently mostly about sound, but capturing in photographs some of the most memorable moments there has been a labour of love for many, and an exhibition of some of the studio's most striking images is opening in London today.

25:22I went along earlier for a sneak preview and met two of the people whose work, either photography or curation, has helped put the exhibition together. My name's Tom Pallant and I'm a photographer. Tom, lead us across the room because we've got an array of photographs on this far wall with the sign Abby wrote to our left. And the reason I'm keen for you to take us here is that there's some of your own work on this wall. So describe the one that I can see here with a slouching figure on a sofa who looks as if he's had a bit of a tough day. Yeah, he's had a very long day. Yeah, so this is my image taken of Youngblood in Hansa Studios in Berlin.

26:05We were there for about two weeks in early 2025, filming and recording a documentary film based around his album Idols.

26:21It's one of the more reflective moments that I've captured. Just above the one we've been describing of yours, was top left. So this is a photo by Pune Gana of the Viagra boys in Nashville. Yeah. And we have a guy on the stage who's just taken a fairly hefty swig of beer, I'm assuming, who is then propelling that beer from his mouth into somebody in the front of the crowd. Yeah. An average night out. Definitely. Knowing what I know about Viagra boys, this is an absolute standard.

27:06It's a great photo. It's unbelievable. I think, you know, you can even see in the reaction from the security guy standing in the pit, what's going on. He's got a bit of a smirk on his face. I mean, he may not well have seen that before. My name's Rick Guest, and I'm part of the Legacy and Art Collective, and I specialise in making large-format, hyper detailed prints of astonishing artefacts and the images on this wall there are four of them and they are all representative of the recording of um sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band we have the steinway uh famously known as the mrs mills piano um which is all the all the beatles tracks that have uh piano on on sergeant pepper's was recorded on it um and hopefully you You can see every mark, every scratch, which represents every note, every song that was played on it and recorded for that session.