Who gets out - and who comes in

 I doubt the liberal congoscenti will begin to comprehend the spittle flecked fury raging across the country about the erroneous release of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant who arrived on a small boat and was convicted of sex offences on a 12 year old girl and a woman. When we heard this was the very dude whose original arrest was the trigger for the protests and disturbances at the Bell hotel, Epping it was a "you could not make that up" moment.

To my surprise the story wasn't even on the front page of most of the newspapers the next day which I found bizarre.

He's now been nabbed but the story epitomises the general air of incompetence around anything to do with the British government and the functions and services under its control. Many in authority will just sigh that this sort of thing is inevitable. I don't for a moment believe it is.

On the latest figures over 260 prisoners were incorrectly released in the 12 months to March 2025, a 128% increase on the previous year. So the number more than doubled. David 'Mastermind' Lammy said the government had "inherited a system that was collapsing" but he and Shabana Mahmood have overseen it getting much worse.  Something is clearly wrong in the system and I agree with the commentator who said this isn't really about an error by one person. If one officer did make an error I'm left wondering how the relevant process doesn't build in adequate checks.

Apparently the paperwork is awfully complicated. That sounds a very lame excuse. There will, I accept, be resource limitations and there is currently huge pressure on prison officers in our inadequate and overcrowded prison estate (another Tory failure, I must say. One would have thought building more prisons would have played well with their base).

But still none of that is an excuse. I don't know whether it is, but I would expect all paperwork on dangerous prisoners to be clearly marked. But I would also have expected that high political risk prisoners, like Kebatu, would be identified. There can't have been many higher political risk prisoners in the jail categories lower than A, the highest security. One can only assume they are not, which I find incredible.

Stats on the gov.uk website suggest that something like 90,000 prisoners a year are released, mainly on licence, and claims a "success rate" of 99.5%. I think that's a pretty abysmal performance for this particular activity. 1 in 200 is a fairly typical of a human error rate in a system without proper checking. A system that should be aspiring to very high reliability should be able to easily get to 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 and a high integrity system would expect to do much better than that. The government doesn't need to hold an expensive and time consuming public inquiry. It needs to marshall some of the expertise readily available to it and get a team of independent people with experience in prisons and in sectors like aviation, rail and nuclear and sort out a process that works. Releasing the wrong person shouldn't really happen more than a handful of times a year at the most, if ever.

Meanwhile the long run up to Rachel Reeves's budget continues and speculation grows. Why did she push the budget back to the latest possible date? The reason, as any accountant will tell you, is that bad numbers take much longer to add up.

I may return to what Reeves should do in her second budget but for now one can't help reflect that she didn't make particularly sound and robust decisions in her first, which was meant to be a "sort things out, once-off this parliament" budget. The general air of doom and despondency Reeves allowed to take hold in the run up to her last budget is being repeated. Talking down the economy and hiking taxes, with the ill judged NI increase made inevitable by Labour's rash manifesto promises, all pushed in the opposite direction to Labour's aspiration for growth. As Charles Colville pointed out in the Sunday Times if you talk down the economy and increase taxes on businesses then those businesses don't invest. Who knew? Well everyone, pretty much.

One straw in the wind I saw was an analysis by Chris Walker, of the independent economics consultancy Chamberlain Walker, which suggests that 1,800 former non-doms have left the country since April, twice the number expected, after Reeves abolished non-dom status which allowed people whose permanent homes are abroad to escape tax on their overseas income and wealth (note not their UK income). Most people would shrug their shoulders about that but it probably means that Reeves won't anything like get the extra £34 billion she predicted. Indeed I would expect the tax take to go down from the abolition of non-dom status. Which is why so many chancellors had left an arrangement that dated back over 200 years in place. Rachel clearly thought she knew better than two centuries of her predecessors.

The Treasury responded that the 1,800 estimate was based on "anecdotal evidence that we don't recognise". That is because the Treasury rely on data from HMRC, which collects information from people in employment. The wealthiest non-doms would be investors in and owners of businesses, not employees. Chris Walker concluded that the Treasury was "effectively flying blind" about the the behaviour of the most responsive group of non-doms, with no real idea of how many have decided to decamp to places like Dubai.

There is a less anecdotal piece of evidence which the Treasury didn't comment on. Ferrari limited its supplies of cars to Britain six months ago amid concerns that some people are getting out of the UK for tax reasons, as it's Chief Executive told the FT. OK, so we know who to believe then.

Reeves countered concerns that non-doms were leaving in an interview with the Guardian last week, in which she said "this is a brilliant country and people want to live here".

Sure Rachel, a lot of them do. The keenest seem to be folk like the guy who was removed under the one in one out deal with France and was back on a small boat within a month, d'oh...

I suppose that did show that we have some processes that work as at least that dude was immediately identified. Still, it's shame we can't swap out these two