Sentencing Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Lords Chamber

I look forward to hearing from the Minister as he addresses these issues and explains why it is not possible to go further in the programme of reforms undertaken over the previous few years by allowing public hearings to become the default position. I thank him in anticipation of his engaging on this issue. On that basis, I ask him to look favourably on this amendment, because I think that the time for reform has arrived.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough in general terms. In particular, I believe that we must assess the effectiveness of measures introduced—and, if they are not effective, we need to go back to the drawing board.

I also wish to speak to my Amendment 93B, which seeks to ensure participation by prison inmates in education and training or “other purposeful activity”. That was not my original description, although I find that the awful word “purposeful” was first used in 1598—but it also had a secondary meaning of “determined” or “resolute”, which makes me feel a lot better.

I have tabled this amendment because I am concerned about the state of education in prisons, both now and going forward. My wording is far from perfect, since to keep it in scope of this narrow Bill, it can apply only to custodial sentences from the day on which the Bill comes into force as an Act, whereas the problem is endemic across the prison estate. The amendment would provide for an annual review of progress, and the implementing regulations bringing it in would be subject to affirmative resolution, to make the amendment more palatable to the Minister and his officials.

As a fellow former retailer, I admire the Minister, his distinguished father and Timpson the company, the repair chain that they run, and their brilliant work on rehabilitation of offenders. However, I was sorry to hear that their workshop in Wandsworth Prison has not reopened. The truth is that the success of these and parallel efforts by other companies to get ex-convicts into long-term work requires offenders to be appropriately trained while inside.

The Government are hoping that the measures they are taking to free up prisons, some of which are hard for people to stomach, will provide more time and resource to supervise education, skills training and purposeful activity. However, on 15 October, Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, wrote a blog about the problems in adult prisons. He had been contacted by despairing governors and heads of education about the cuts in provision they are facing under new prison education contracts. The Prison Service has told him there will be an average reduction of some 25% of provision, but some prison leaders say they are losing as much as 60%. As he refers to, there are powerful reasons why we should

“ensure that an inmate does not spend day after day in blank inactivity”.

Why is there so little acknowledgement of the role of reduced reoffending as part of our goal of shrinking the prison population?

As few as 31% of prisoners are still employed six months after leaving prison. This is not surprising when 20 out of 38 prisons inspected in the last reporting year were rated poor or not sufficiently good for purposeful activity. It takes weeks to get prisoners into work and attendance at training courses is often shockingly low. The working day is short, often as little as five hours, particularly on Fridays, yet prisoners need to get into the job habit for their future success.

Another problem is the low literacy levels of many prisoners and, I suspect, poor English in many cases. We had a similar challenge at Tesco and, with the support of the trade unions, we arranged education that helped to keep employees in the firm, grateful for the lessons and the extra opportunities they opened up. With the widening of employment rights, it becomes even more important to use the many months that many spend in prison for remedial education and skills training, so that employers can take them on with confidence, without the fear of a long drawn-out industrial tribunal if they do not perform.

I know only too well that prisoners differ. There are career criminals who are very clever, entrepreneurial and risk-taking. They might have been captains of industry with a different background or ethical compass. They need something different and to be kept separate, but they need to be fully occupied so that they are not continuing their evil operations from inside prison. From time to time, some go straight, especially if they are inspired to change—for example, by taking a degree.

As the average sentence of those actually in prison becomes longer, the need for opportunities and for better education of the prison population becomes ever greater. Incentive schemes, early release and management of privileges are important. I hope that the Minister, in replying, will explain how the new sentencing laws can help with prison education by improving the incentive structure.

However, I believe that a more radical approach may be needed and that we should oblige prisoners who are still subject to custodial sentences to enter education, training, et cetera, as part of the prison regime, as is done in the military. Just providing adequate access to education, although important, is not enough. I have seen the failure of voluntary training in the Civil Service: the good and hard-working opt for the training and improve; those who really need it do not.

So I am looking for mandatory education or training for those who remain in prison after the Government’s reforms, all of whom will, in practice, be sentenced to 18 months or more. They will be serious criminals and badly in need of focused rehabilitation. That is why, to pick up a theme from discussion on day one, which I was sadly absent for, we cannot have a voluntary regime in prisons.

Our jails cost a fortune, and prisoners are bored, demotivated and wasting time as they serve their years. Education and the acquisition of skills, or helping out in the kitchens and gardens, can be transformational.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

I agree with almost everything my noble friend has said. I have been on a prisons monitoring board, so I am very familiar with the inside of prison. But it troubles me that, if there is a requirement that the prisoner, as part of his sentence, does A or B, but the prison does not provide the facility, is the prisoner not then in breach of the sentence and is that not going to be a problem when he seeks to get release or goes to a parole board?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that question; it is a good one. However, in my amendment we are talking about future sentences, not existing ones, and we need to find a way of encouraging a radical change in prisons. This is Committee and this is a probing amendment. However, we do need to look at making an element of requirement for these long servers, or it just does not happen. I speak with my experience of the public sector and what happens if there are no requirements. I look forward to hearing how the Minister plans to take this agenda forward in the new world, and I hope that he will agree that a suitable amendment to the Bill could be extremely worthwhile.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this group of amendments covers a range of different issues, all under the heading of accountability and transparency. I say, generally, that we must concede that the public, for good reason, are pretty cynical about prison policy at the moment and are suspicious of changes in sentencing. There are all sorts of controversies that have arisen around both of those things. Many of us spoke to these issues at Second Reading. For the Bill to not simply become part of that cynicism, we need to ensure that the decisions made in relation to this legislation are as open to public scrutiny as possible.

In that spirit, I particularly support Amendment 93A from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, which calls for a report on the efficacy of reforms in relation to community sentences and suspended prison sentences. In some of the discussions we have had, it is as though we are saying that, if we increase the number of suspended sentences and community sentences, reoffending rates will simply go down, because people will be in the community and there will be rehabilitation everywhere. Somehow, prison is intrinsically blamed for making people in prison absolutely guaranteed to carry on offending when they leave prison. That is one description we heard from a number of noble Lords at Second Reading.

My concern is that we might fool ourselves sometimes about a rehabilitative utopia in the community. I used an analogy at Second Reading about mental health care. Of course, if you posit the situation of locking people up in psychiatric hospitals and then say, “How will they possibly get well?”, and that we should have much more community provision, I will often agree. The problem is that, if you release people from those hospitals into the community without provision, it is a disaster for everybody: both for innocent victims, in some instances, and for patients.

My worry is that the worthy aims associated with the Bill will not be able to be delivered because of a lack of resources in the community. I am also concerned that, despite the undoubtedly honourable, genuine and sincere intentions of the Minister in this House, the arguments used to justify this piece of legislation elsewhere by the rest of the Government have been much more pragmatic and utilitarian. Effectively, they are saying, “We have to review sentencing and do all these things because our jails are too full”. That is not the same as a principled commitment to improving things. So, at the very least, we owe it to the British public to check what happens once this Bill comes into action. Whether it delivers—its efficacy—is incredibly important because, if it does not work, people in the community will suffer. So Amendment 93A is crucial.

I absolutely support the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, in her Amendment 93B. One of the reasons why we say prison does not work and people argue there is a problem with it is precisely that the purposeful activity—or just using prison in a way that could be constructive and giving prisoners access to training, work, education and so on, while being a punishment—is just not being delivered at the moment. You can say that it is happening, but it is not.

The Minister knows that I am involved in a project called Debating Matters Beyond Bars, which runs debating competitions in prisons. The prisoners involved in these often say, “It’s really good to have the opportunity to have a bit of pugilism that is intellectual rather than fisticuffs”. Having something to think about, talk about, debate and discuss is education, too. But it is absolutely excruciating trying to get those kinds of projects off the ground in prisons, because there just are not the resources. The number of prisoners I have met over the years who have been enthusiastic about doing some kind of education or training but were unable to access it simply fuels this notion that prisons are not working and have become seething morasses of frustration. That cannot be good for anyone. So I would like to make this mandatory as well. It would be quite difficult, because that is not entirely to do with accountability—except that, if we could see accountability and transparency in what is happening with education and training in prison, it would inform the broader debate rather than just being mentioned.

Finally, I am absolutely not sure about Amendment 127 from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, which would enable public scrutiny of Parole Board proceedings. I watched every episode of the BBC series on parole—they were fascinating insights—and I think that parole hearings, the boards and what happens in relation to parole are crucial and key. The noble Lord has included reference to objections from victims, families and legal representatives, but my concern is about the notion that everything should always be open. I have argued for political transparency and accountability, which is fine, but the Parole Board does things that might require discretion and some privacy. For example, it has been drawn to my attention that members of staff might want to say off the record that the Parole Board should not let a prisoner out. I do not necessarily want that being made widely available. So it is more complicated than just saying, “Open up the Parole Board”. Those are my reservations.

The whole parole system requires careful scrutiny. The frustrations of prisoners, their families and victims often centre on what happens at parole hearings. Noble Lords will know about IPP prisoners, whose whole fate rests on what happens at Parole Board hearings. I understand people’s frustrations about feeling that they are not given a fair hearing and not being able to make public what happens, but it is not a black and white issue and I am therefore uncertain about that amendment.