Polling suggests Lucy Powell enjoyed a healthy lead over Bridget Phillipson as voting closed on Thursday
Prime minister Keir Starmer and justice secretary David Lammy should take responsibility for the error which led to a former asylum seeker who sexually assaulted a woman and a teenage girl to be accidentally released from prison, Epping Forest’s Tory MP said on Saturday.
Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, 38, was jailed for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, a crime which triggered protests at the Bell hotel in Epping where he had been staying.
Epping Forest MP Neil Hudson told BBC Radio 4’s Today:
This sounds like an operational error, but the buck has to stop somewhere, and it has to stop at the top, at the justice secretary, the home secretary and the prime minister.
