Lewes prison is holding 614 people in the 461 certified places in use — 133% full.

The August prison population bulletin was the only new release of the morning — the Met Office station files and the NHS waiting-list tables both came back unchanged — so today's edition is one dataset, and says so rather than padding.

The lead's record is a margin of one person: 613 people in July, 614 in August, in certified space that has not moved since March. We watched for this rather than found it — Lewes set its own record in the July bulletin, and we wrote down three weeks ago that a second record in the August bulletin would be the story.

The record has a larger cause than the one person, and the subject says so: Lewes's certified places in use fell from 614 to 458 in February 2026 and have been 461 since. August's 614 people would have been exactly 100% of the pre-February figure — and are fewer people than Lewes held in March 2018, when it had 623. The highest crowding in our eight-year record is reached with a population its old certification would have absorbed; what changed most is the space. The figures are the publisher's own, in the bulletin the lead links.

The Met Office's provisional August figures, including the station records we reported on 3 September, went unrevised through the whole first-week fetch window, which closed today. If the finalisation changes them, we will report it when we next read the files in early October.