Sentencing Bill

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the tributes made to the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. Our thoughts are with her family today.

This Bill is important. The UK has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe and one of the highest rates of reoffending. People in our prisons are not typical of people in Britain. They are more likely to have grown up in a family facing financial hardship, more likely to have poor literacy and numeracy skills, and more likely not to have a job. They are more likely to have been homeless or in unstable housing, more likely to have suffered from a mental health issue, more likely to have had a drug or alcohol addiction problem, and more likely to have suffered childhood abuse or trauma. These are the differences before they enter prison.

There are some amazing people and some amazing organisations, some of which have already been mentioned, working to help people address some of these situational factors that increase the likelihood of people offending again. Programmes such as StandOut, Clean Slate Solutions and Recruitment Junction all help transform people’s lives and stand as examples of what can be done. These programmes, although significant for the lives they have turned around, are still the exception rather than the norm.

David Gauke’s review into sentencing rightly made three points that I particularly want to draw out. First, focusing on rehabilitation and moving to greater use of community sentences could, in some instances, be a way of reducing reoffending. There is significant evidence, as has been mentioned, that short custodial sentences in particular often do more to increase the chances of reoffending, for all the obvious reasons, such as cutting people off from social ties, exposing them to more serious offenders and placing a stigma around them. Secondly, efficiency matters, and we should prioritise focusing expensive prison places on those most serious offenders who pose the greatest risk to public safety. Thirdly, importantly, he points out:

“The overwhelming consensus from the evidence the Review has gathered is that rehabilitative support in the community is, in many cases, the most effective way to reduce reoffending. This relates to the services offenders are required to engage with when serving a sentence in the community or released into the community on licence, following a custodial sentence”.


In theory, the Bill seeks to address these points. I am concerned, though, that good intentions are not enough. The Bill’s provisions and the government policies that sit alongside them need to go further in establishing the adequacy of supervision, providing accountability and, crucially, as has been mentioned numerous times, guaranteeing resourcing if they are to make any real difference to reoffending and not simply make the problem worse.

I would be grateful if the Minister could specifically address the following points, which pick up on these themes that have been raised many times now. First, the Bill relies heavily on electronic monitoring working, yet this is an area that historically has been rife with problems. What guarantees can he make that there will be a step change in monitoring to ensure its adequacy? Will he consider what further provisions can be set out in the Bill to address this point?

Secondly, Clinks estimates that there are close to 2,000 community and voluntary organisations operating in the criminal justice sector. Scaling the capacity of these organisations will be crucial to delivering the reduction in reoffending the Bill seeks to address, yet the Bill says nothing about them. Will the Minister consider introducing a suite of policies to sit alongside the Bill to ensure that voluntary and community organisations engaged in the delivery of community rehabilitation services are adequately supported and resourced to perform their functions under it? This could include policies such as: a move away from short-term contracting towards multiyear unrestricted grant funding; as has been mentioned earlier; a rebalancing away from national commissioning to regional commissioning; and greater use of co-commissioning, where funds can be pooled between departments. Will he also consider what measures could be included in the Bill to hold the Government accountable for the adequacy of resourcing to the sector?

Thirdly, on assessment and accountability, sentences are an area that would benefit from a more evidence-based approach, as has been discussed. It is vital that resources are focused on measures that are most effective at reducing reoffending. Will the Minister consider what more can be done, either within the Bill or alongside it, to ensure that robust assessment is made of the effect of different combinations of requirements on reducing reoffending? Will he commit that this assessment and any associated reporting mechanism will then have an impact on how future resources in the system are allocated?

Lastly, on resourcing, the Bill is intended in part to reduce reoffending. To do so, it will need to dramatically transform the level of support that offenders are given to turn their lives around, tackling entrenched and multifaceted practical challenges, from addiction to poor literacy. As the Institute for Government notes, the Bill shifts the weight of responsibility for much more of this into the community. The Minister has committed that, alongside the Bill, £700 million will be deployed into the Probation Service over the spending review period, yet no detailed breakdown of how the £700 million will be spent has been published. What reassurances can he give that that amount will be adequate? Will he commit to publishing a breakdown of how the money will be spent?

To reiterate, the objectives of the Bill as they relate to reducing reoffending are welcome, but neither its specific provisions nor the policy and commitments that sit alongside it go far enough in explaining or guaranteeing how this greater focus on transformation in the community will happen. I urge the Government to consider how they can strengthen the Bill and associated policies to ensure that there is proper accountability, reporting and adequate resourcing to prevent the measures contained in it making a difficult situation worse.

Crown Court Criminal Case Backlog

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I also start by welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and thanking her for an important maiden speech. The issues of sentencing, prisons and the court system simply cannot be separated. The backlogs that have triggered this debate must be looked at in that wider context. The recent Public Accounts Committee report, looking specifically at the Crown Court backlog, made the point that, at the end of last year, 11% of the prison population was made up of remand inmates, the highest level in 50 years. Some 32% of the remand population have been held on remand beyond six months, with 5% on remand for more than two years. The report makes the point that even getting levels down to where they were in 2019, just six years ago, would free up as many as 8,000 prison places.

The state of our prisons and the very difficult and important work of helping to equip people for a life beyond their release is made even harder with such a high proportion of inmates there on remand. The situation is also not helping the remand prisoners themselves; the longer someone waits before coming to court for resolution of their guilt or innocence in the eyes of the law, the more removed they often become from the day-to-day fabric of their life, job, family and friends. That helps no one.

There has been political consensus for a long time now that much sentencing is not optimal, with people being sent to prison when in many cases other sentences would be more appropriate. The courts sit at the heart of this conversation. The sentencing review that has been referenced and is being undertaken by David Gauke is hugely important, but these reforms should not be looked at piecemeal. As Leveson also undertakes his review into this issue around backlogs and the criminal courts more broadly, the two reviews absolutely must be dovetailed together into one coherent whole.

Reform is long overdue, and it requires us to look at the system as a whole: sentencing and courts. With court backlogs and prison capacity forcing these issues to be addressed, we should see this as an opportunity. I ask the Minister two specific questions. First, what is being done to consider the impact of the large number of remand prisoners on the wider pressures and capacity issues in the prison system? Secondly, can he commit that the Government will respond in an integrated way to the two reviews when they report, and consider changes to sentencing and the courts system as a whole?