When Andy Burnham stood outside Downing Street last week, having achieved his long-held ambition to lead this country, he told us that he was “a circuit breaker for Britain” who would change politics to make it “more about problem-solving than point-scoring”.

We have, of course, heard similar pledges from predecessors who stood outside that famous black door. Yet how depressing that in his first few days, our latest prime minister has indicated he will continue stumbling along the path of perhaps the most egregious example of state failure.

Three days after that speech promising a new politics, Burnham announced he was pausing the prison early release scheme. This followed fury from victims and their families – most notably the widow and mother of Andrew Harper, the police officer killed in 2019 after being dragged along a road by a car driven by three teenagers. Two of the killers, sentenced to 13 years prison for manslaughter, could have been set free next year under a new law – so his family was outraged. Their anger – calling the idea “deplorable” and saying “every victim will be feeling the same” about the scheme – is understandable after such a cruel crime. I would feel exactly the same. 

Yet our prison system is a mess, absorbing the consequences of political failures in education, health and social care – and the persistent failure to fix this broken public service leads to misery for more victims. We lock up people at higher rates than anywhere else in Western Europe with numbers doubling over past three........

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