It is.

There, there is a strength of feeling, uh, not just in, in the police service, but in the community more widely, that we need to make sure that these people who are brave enough to sign on and, and work on our behalf and put themselves on offer on our behalf are going to have the full protection of the criminal justice system.

And, and, uh, it, it's a serious misstep, I think, by, by the government to think that this wouldn't matter.

Um, and I think it's really what we get when we have people in ministerial roles who don't really understand that role and that brief, and they're taking advice from the mandarins, from the civil servants as to what can be done and what can't be done.

And the whole thing with this is, is, is I've been saying from the beginning, look, it's Parliament, they can make whatever laws lay- they like.

They have a majority of 162.

If they want...

But looking at the number of people in prison for manslaughter, you're talking a few hundred, so I don't believe it.

What are they in prison for, Commissioner?

mostly for drug offences, for theft, for things that have happened in abusive relationships and so forth, and there's literally nowhere else to put them.

And as they would present less of a risk to the general public, and particularly to women and girls, what we're saying is that they should be the ones that are looked at first in terms of being released, and the fact that you would then have a disproportionate number of women compared to men released would mean that you would have to corral the remaining dangerous women in maybe one or two prisons and that would then free up the space in the other women's prisons to be converted to men's prisons and hence you've got your increased capacity

How have we got ourselves into these dire straits, would you say, Commissioner?

We've got ourselves into dire straits because the Tory government for 14 years didn't build enough prisons, and we now have this immediate acute crisis, and the current government is either unwilling to spend the money to build prisons at pace, but that would take time anyway.

The other thing which would make a great deal of difference and would create a lot of space for us, of course, would be to deport foreign criminals in British prisons, but that would need derogation from the ECHR probably to happen.

And this government's got no appetite for that either.

So this is where we are, where the only way we can create this space is by letting people out.

Uh, when it comes to women who are serious offenders, violent offenders, what would happen to them?

them?Oh, they would say because the same judgment about the risk that they pose to, to the general public would be made against them.

And, and, and actually the, you know, whether, whether male or female is irrelevant in those circumstances.

Uh, it's, it, it's just that the effect of this would be that more women got released, um, than you, than you might imagine if it was done kind of proportionately, and that would actually mean that there would be some, uh, some tweaks needed around the prison estate to, to effectively to corral the remaining dangerous women who are staying in prison in, in one place to free up the space so that we could convert, uh, what are currently female prisons into prisons that are suitable for housing men and, and thus the, the increase in the numbers of the estate is, is made.

Um, but as, and, and we'll hear a little bit more from Andrea as well, some of the women, as you've mentioned, uh, come from very difficult backgrounds, and I suppose people would wonder, if they were released immediately, are the services there to help them if they did walk out through prison doors?

Uh, and that's a very good point.

And, and the, the probation service, wh- on whom that would fall, I guess, immediately, um, are stretched in just the same way.

And of course, the new Sentencing Act doesn't help that because that puts a, uh, puts a, a great sort of, um, burden on, on probation to, to help make the system work.

Reform's newly elected Norfolk Police and Crime Commissioner, Colin Sutton, went on first to introduce him.

My job here is just to introduce the main man.

He's just plain mister at the moment.

Not for long.

He's the next MP for Clacton and then he'll be the next Prime Minister of the UK.

And I don't know that much about policing.

Maybe I do.

What do you think about the by-election taking place?

How did you react as a former police detective but also as a Reform UK colleague of Van's?

Yeah, I mean, in terms of what happened around the initial reports and the police and the investigation and so forth, you know, I really don't like to get too involved because I feel the pain of the people that are trying to investigate with the world and his wife on social media, giving them helpful advice, shall we say, and I don't want to join that list.

I think we're in a position where because of social media and because of the pressure that now is on the police to say something, that we may have, as often happens, the pendulum's gone a bit too far and now they've started saying things before they should.

Investigating murders is hard and things come at you very quickly while you're doing it and things change very quickly because of that.

And I think that, you know, We mustn't let ourselves get pushed by social media and the armchair detectives into making comments that prove to be ill-founded or unwise even in the end.

So that's my kind of view on that side of it.

And I have to say, I think the assistant commissioner in the Met, Lawrence Taylor, who's taken over for the counter-terrorism branch, has done a good job of shoring that up and made some good comments.

What are your thoughts on that, on language, on tone and where we should sort of be headed in the future in terms of

But what about a seasoned detective like my friend Colin Sutton?

When the letter is looked at, I think it, it...

You smell a rat immediately.

He'd not only gone to great pains to say how much he loved Rachel and what a wonderful weekend it was and saying that he was now wending his way away from her smiling face.

He didn't just sort of say, "Did you get home with that guy okay?" It was, it was laid on thick.

It was, "How lucky we were to find that friend of yours with the long hair who said he had a car and who said he could take you away." He was being too clever.

He was over-egging the pudding really in trying to set up this distraction of a, a mystery suspect.

The reconstruction based on his account of what happened at the station did jog the memory of somebody who'd been there, but she remembered the events very differently.

But how had Stewart killed Helen before dumping her body in the cesspit? The pathologist who carried out the post-mortem would soon provide a vital clue.

Helen had traces in her hair of a drug called Zopiclone, which is a pretty powerful sleeping tablet, which is prescribed to people who suffer from chronic insomnia and had been prescribed to Ian Stewart, but never to Helen Bailey.

Her mother and other people have said that sometimes she'd been complaining of fatigue and tiredness during the day and couldn't really understand why she felt that way.

It looks like she felt that way because he and Stuart had been feeding her sleeping pills.

They found him guilty of murder and the judge jailed him for life.

Ian Stewart had an arrogance in terms of his ability to control essentially his own destiny.

He wanted to exercise control over Helen in the relationship, exercise control over the finances and the important things in that relationship.

And when Helen died, he thought that he could still wield that power and control over the police, over the family and people that were involved, and still come out of it on top and in control.

former homicide detective Colin Sutton.

When you're investigating a missing person, a disappearance like this, you always go to the person who last saw the missing person alive or last saw them before they went missing.

And you also always go to those closest to them because unfortunately, statistically, if something bad has happened, those closest to the victim are going to be involved.

They're much more likely to be involved than complete strangers.

A signal from it had connected to a mast in Broadstairs on April 12th, the same day he had gone there supposedly to search for her.

As this investigation had proceeded, more and more items of circumstantial evidence had been discovered and they kind of... begin to build on each other and to present a weight of a theory that actually Helen Bale is probably dead and therefore we need to undertake a proper homicide investigation so that we can do the forensic searching, the questioning and put the other resources into this investigation that we wouldn't want to use simply for a missing person.

Yeah.

And I think it caused...

You know, we've got a culture now that we've allowed to develop whereby just the use of that word makes ordinary, reasonable, sane, and sensible people lose their sense of proportion, lose their sense of what's right.

And, you know, I...

Obviously, it's completely the wrong thing to, to, to happen.

You know, a police officer's duty is always first to try and preserve life before anything else.

But it just goes to show that, you know, there, there is such a culture of fear now a- around these kind of identitarian issues that as soon as somebody raises it, a different mindset sets in.

How much is it cultural, Colin, and how much is it that the cops have to do this?

Wow.

He had a particularly misogynistic streak.

He was, you know, I, I spent an awful lot of my career not just doing murders, but in, in other roles, um, dealing with domestic abuse and domestic violence, and he is by far and away the worst perpetrator of domestic abuse I ever came across, period.

Every single woman that ever had, um, a relationship with Levi Bellfield, and there were lots of them, came out of it harmed either physically or financially or sexually or mentally or sometimes all four.

So, you know, he, he, he was a very nasty piece of work in that respect.

He's very cunning.

He's not educated, but he's smart.

Looking back on it, h- how was it?