𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Shoplifters and dangerous drivers should be let out of prison before killers, rapists and paedophiles, Kemi Badenoch has declared. The Tory leader, speaking alongside rape victims during an emotional press conference, urged Prime Minister Andy Burnham to avoid “the worst of all options”.

And she said Labour should consider renting prison spaces in other countries to alleviate the overcrowding crisis behind bars. Mrs Badenoch’s intervention came as victims of rape revealed, in harrowing detail, how Labour’s sentencing reforms have stolen their “justice” and created a new sense of terror and heartache. Grooming gang survivor Sarah Wilson warned Mr Burnham: “Paedophiles will never be rehabilitated.

“We need to exempt all these dangerous offenders. I’d prefer a thief on the streets than someone who’s going to rape another child.”

Under current plans, they were among the 6,000 due to be released from September.

Survivor Carol Higgins, who was repeatedly raped by her own father, said: “The judge said that the depravity of his crimes and the effect on me warranted the 20-year sentence.

“He raped me nearly every day for over two years and beat and groomed me from birth, so the sentence already does not accurately reflect the depravity.

“Instead of serving 50% of his sentence in prison, he will only serve 33%.

“Every minute taken off his prison time is a minute added to my fear and anxiety and a trigger for my complex PTSD.

“I will be forever looking over my shoulder and wondering if he is there whenever I step out of my door.

“Innocent children should not have their lives stolen anymore. Reducing the sentence is stealing my justice.”

She added: “They will say my dad is an older man and not a risk. He was not an old man when he was raping me. He did the crime. He should serve the time. Do not let him out early.”

Under Labour’s plans, killers and rapists will be let out of prison early, while 43,000 criminals will avoid jail altogether.

Many convicts will be released after serving just a third of their jail term.

And those sentenced to four years or more will only be let out after serving 50% of their sentence behind bars. The first cohort is expected to be released on September 2.

Criminals handed sentences shorter than 18 months will be the first to be freed this September.

Releases will then ramp up month by month. Offenders handed more than 12 years in jail – some of the most dangerous criminals in the country – will start to be freed next June.

The Conservative Party leader said: “We do need to build new prison places more quickly and cheaply. This will cost money, but it also needs communities to be supportive of prisons being built around them.

“One of the things that did cause delays was judicial reviews of prisons not being built.

“If everybody says ‘no prison near me’, we won’t get these built, so this is something that the public can help with – let us build prisons to put these people in. We cannot say ‘no’ to every potential site for a prison.”

Mrs Badenoch added: “The second thing that we can do a little bit earlier is rent prison places overseas. This was something which we were doing in government, we had plans to rent prison places just like Sweden has done with Estonia, so that we didn’t have to just release these sorts of violent criminals early.”

The party leader also called for the Government to “remove foreign offenders to prisons in their home countries”, saying the UK must “leave the [European] Convention on Human Rights”, which she described as a blocker on removals.

Justice chiefs fear they will run out of spaces in November unless urgent action is taken.

Jade Belgrove, who is a child rape survivor, said: “We can’t carry on like this. We can’t face this trauma day in, day out; it’s so tiring, and we’re tired of fighting. We need this resolved, and we need it sorted now.”

Marie Stone, who was sexually assaulted as a child by Harry Miah, who is due to be released if his 18-year term is cut to six years, said: “We are exhausted. Absolutely exhausted, to our stomachs. I just feel that something needs to be done.”

Ms Stone added: “We have this for our lives, PTSD for life, if anybody knows what that actually means, it’s destroying us.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Protecting the public will always be our top priority. That’s why we are taking decisive action to fix the prison crisis we inherited while investing record sums to support victims.

“But after 14 years where prison places increased by just 500, our prisons were days away from running out of places. This would have caused the total breakdown of law and order.

“We are pulling every lever to protect the public and cut crime – building prison places at the fastest rate since the Victorian era, launching the biggest-ever expansion of tagging to toughen community punishment and giving victims a say in the strict licence conditions of offenders.

“We have paused changes due to start in September to conduct an urgent review to make sure we get this policy right for victims without running out of prison spaces.”