‘Close to breaking point’: Prison release blunders 'potentially dangerous’ for Britain, chief inspector warns

Charlie Taylor's assessment comes as it emerged two prisoners released in error last year remain at large, while two others understood to have been freed by mistake in June this year.

Mr Taylor warned the growing number of accidental early releases was "embarrassing and potentially dangerous".

He blamed the mistakes on "an overcomplicated sentencing framework" as he warned of "a symptom of a system that is close to breaking point".

Prison inspections "repeatedly highlight the failure to keep prisons secure, safe and decent, and to provide the sort of activity that will help inmates get work on release", he wrote in the Telegraph. 

Mr Taylor added that both Conservative and Labour governments' responses to the overcrowding crisis in Britain’s jails have put pressure on "junior prison staff who repeatedly had to recalculate every prisoner's release date".

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He added that this has been made worse due to successive governments early-release schemes introduced by successive governments.

He warned these changes "increase the likelihood of mistakes and in three years the number of releases in error has gone up from around 50 a year to 262".

It comes as Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy faces mounting pressure by other MPs.

Liberal Democrat MP Ben Maguire told LBC News: "The government have been in power now for 15 months, so it is getting a bit boring just hearing the previous government get blamed for this."

He continued: "It seems to be happening on a daily basis and the government just aren't really giving it the attention and ultimately the funding that it deserves.

"I have a tiny amount of sympathy in the fact that he has been only in the job for a few weeks."

Dame Anne Owers, Formerly Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, who led the Independent Review of Prison Capacity which was published this summer, told LBC: "Prisons lost a lot of staff under austerity and they've taken on new staff but in one local prison I went to, there were 60% of the staff who were within their first two years, now, that's a lot of loss of experience.

"It's particularly difficult in London prisons to recruit so that you've got this potentially really problematic combination of too many prisoners and too few staff with limited experience."

Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, a 24-year-old Algerian national, was accidentally freed from the London prison on October 29.

The sex offender was arrested in Finsbury Park, North London, at around 11:30am on Friday.

Officers confirmed his identity and arrested him for being unlawfully at large. He was also arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker in relation to a previous incident.