It’s time to be blunt: the government is about to expose hundreds of vulnerable women to the risk of death or serious injury. Survivors of domestic abuse, including women who have suffered years of physical violence and intimidation, are now preparing for the moment in October when 5,000 prisoners begin to be released early. What are these women supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go? Their abusers know where they live. They know where their children go to school.

Following an outcry, rapists and some child sex offenders have been excluded from the early release scheme. But by refusing to exclude men convicted of domestic violence, this government is sending a message that this category of crime – serial in nature and implicated in the deaths of one woman every five days – is simply not a priority.

In 2023, Keir Starmer promised to cut violence against women by half in a decade. It was an eye-catching pledge, although not obviously assisted by his proposal, when he became prime minister, to allow thousands of convicted criminals back on to the streets. No one denies that Andy Burnham has inherited an overcrowding crisis in UK prisons, but his solution – in effect, accepting the previous government’s plan with a few changes – involves taking a huge gamble with women’s lives.

For eight years, I was co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. I saw the devastating extent of intimate partner abuse and the chronic shortage of resources to support victims. I studied domestic homicide reviews with a shudder, seeing how one opportunity after another to save women’s lives had been missed. Now, in the midst of a justified furore, Burnham........

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