Ian Sollom MP writes about how early release can only work if probation does too

Originally written for the Cambridge Independent Column – September 2026

Early release only works if probation does

In my first weeks in Parliament, in July 2024, HM Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) published a report on Cambridgeshire and Peterborough's probation service. Their verdict: Inadequate. Major leadership failures. Gaps in child safeguarding. A workforce stretched past what was sustainable.

It landed in a telling window. The prison capacity crisis that began to emerge that summer was hugely concerning. When MPs returned to the Commons after the summer recess two years ago, the new government launched SDS40, releasing prisoners after 40% of their sentence rather than 50%. I was concerned then about the impact this would have on our struggling probation service. It is difficult to return to Parliament after a summer recess two years later, and face almost exactly the same situation.

Two years is long enough to see whether a problem is being solved or merely managed. This one is being managed.

The fact that prisons are full is a symptom of wider capacity issues across many aspects of criminal justice, and not simply prisons themselves. The remand population – people not yet convicted of anything – has grown 84% since 2019, driven by a Crown Court backlog that the Government has failed to make meaningful progress on. Remand now accounts for close to one in five of everyone in prison in England and Wales. Sentence lengths have also risen, the product of successive governments legislating toughness without costing the capacity it required. And recalls – people probation has already sent back to custody – have surged: 51,419 in the year to March 2026, up 28% on the year before. In the first three months of this year, for the first time on record, more people were recalled to prison in a single quarter than were released from it.

That last step is a terrible loop: early release exists because prisons are at capacity; the system meant to manage people safely in the community is stretched beyond capacity; so prisons stay full partly because probation keeps sending them back. The mechanism designed to relieve the pressure simply circulates the issues.

A new Prime Minister has been mulling the difficult choices around these issues all summer – another echo from two years ago. On taking office, he paused the early release scheme's planned expansion; in August he personally narrowed it further, excluding rape, serious child sexual offences and grooming from eligibility altogether – roughly a thousand fewer releases than planned.

In the Commons last week, the Lord Chancellor gave more detail on the actions he was taking around probation: restriction zones, expanded tagging, tougher licence conditions, £700 million for the probation service by 2028-29, 1,300 more trainee probation officers. Welcome measures. But the safety case for every early release, whether at 50%, 40%, or 33%, rests entirely on probation supervising it properly. That's not an assumption behind the policy. It is the policy.

So it's worth asking where Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Probation Service have got to in the last two years. HMIP reported on the wider East of England region in March, and some things have genuinely improved: a new safeguarding board, a complex-case panel now covering all eight probation units in the region, better information-sharing with police than two years ago. But Cambridgeshire and Peterborough was still named as one of four units still under prioritisation measures – not yet delivering full services, eighteen months after being told to. Across the region, probation officer staffing was largely unchanged at 73% of the target despite recruitment, undermined by vetting delays and high attrition; while recall rates stood at 19.2%. Even the technology meant to backstop all this has gaps – with reports reaching me of days of delays in tagging in some instances. An offender released early, without proper supervision for days, never mind the support needed to successfully re-enter society. Every day of that gap is a day when nobody but our already-stretched police is left to support supervision and catch any breach.

Two years ago, a report that landed in my first days in this job told me that the local mechanism for early release wasn't fit for the job being asked of it. The government is now asking for even more of that same mechanism but with little evidence it is ready for it.

We have to stop going round in circles.