At her press conference, Kemi Badenoch blamed Covid for the fact that the last Conservative government left the country short of prison places. She said: We know that the situation with prisons is challenging. When we were in government, we saw the challenge. We created 14,000 new prison places – it was nowhere near enough. We had a prison-building target in our manifesto. Covid derailed that programme. We’d sold some prisons to get the money to build new ones but the programme, as I said, was derailed. Badenoch conceded that the Tories also had an early release scheme. But she said theirs was not like Labour’s. We also had early release but not like this. We never had this category of prisoners being released. We never had killers, rapists, paedophiles on early release. That is what I want to stop. She also said that Burnham could act “today” to stop the releases. She explained: If Andy Burnham wants to prove that he is serious about this, he needs to revoke the commencement order [th