Release on Temporary Licence and the various early release schemes have both had an unusually high political and media profile over the last two to three years, caught up in the wider argument over prison overcrowding, sentencing and public safety that has run under three different Lord Chancellors since 2023. This page sets out, as even-handedly as we can manage, what has actually changed and what has only been promised or threatened. It sits alongside our ROTL and Early Release Schemes pages, which explain how each system works day to day, and our Press Coverage page, which looks at how the row has played out in the media.
What’s actually changed
In July 2023, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk (Conservative) reversed tighter open-conditions transfer rules brought in by his predecessor Dominic Raab the previous year, which had sharply cut the number of prisoners approved to move to open prisons – the usual gateway into ROTL. When Labour’s Shabana Mahmood took over as Lord Chancellor after the July 2024 election, her department introduced SDS40, moving the automatic release point for standard sentences from 50% to 40% of time served, to relieve severe overcrowding; this changed when prisoners come out automatically, not the separate ROTL system, though the two are frequently run together in press coverage of “prisoners let out early”. The clearest actual tightening of ROTL itself in this period came in August 2025, when HMPPS barred foreign national offenders who have exhausted their appeal rights against deportation from ROTL and open conditions altogether, replacing the previous case-by-case discretion.
Ministers defended the existing open-conditions and ROTL vetting process in Parliament in January 2026, after two men absconded from HMP Leyhill on New Year’s Day, one of them a convicted murderer; a short review of that prison’s procedures was ordered, though ministers also pointed to a national fall in absconds since 2020. In November 2025, the Commons Justice Committee’s report on reoffending recommended HMPPS make ROTL use more consistent across the estate, arguing that overcrowding, wing closures and negative headlines were together discouraging some governors from using it even though compliance rates remain very high. The Government accepted that recommendation in January 2026 and promised pilot schemes and clearer national standards, though no revised ROTL Policy Framework document had been published by the time of writing.
Promises and threats that haven’t (yet) become policy
Not everything that’s been proposed has actually happened. David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review, commissioned by Mahmood in late 2024 and reporting in May 2025, recommended the “earned progression” model described on our Early Release Schemes page, but made no specific recommendation on ROTL itself. Its proposals became law as part of the Sentencing Act 2026 – and it’s this earned-progression scheme, not ROTL, that triggered the biggest political row of the period. In July 2026, incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham paused the scheme’s rollout just before it was due to start, after the family of murdered PC Andrew Harper objected publicly to two of his killers becoming eligible for earlier release under it. Burnham ordered an urgent review, due to report in September 2026, and asked new Justice Secretary Alex Norris to look at excluding some categories of offence from earned progression altogether. Prisons Minister James Timpson stood down the day before Burnham’s reshuffle, after two years in the post; no source gives an explicit stated reason for his resignation, though it followed this row closely. None of this has, as yet, produced a formal change to ROTL policy itself – but it has visibly raised the political temperature around all forms of early and temporary release, ROTL included, and this page will likely need updating again once the September review reports.
For how this row has been reported, see our Press Coverage page.