Sentencing Bill

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, and I join others in the House in paying tribute to Baroness Newlove. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, I was very taken with my noble and learned friend Lord Burnett of Maldon saying that lengthening sentences does not necessarily improve reoffending. It is quite an interesting thought.

I am not a lawyer, rather like the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, but I have retained an interest in sentencing and imprisonment following many years as a trustee of the Koestler Trust, which puts arts into prisons. The whole purpose of this is to give prisoners access to self-expression through the arts and music, which in turn enables a degree of hope. Hope is a very important word to which I will return.

There are two matters that I would particularly like to address. The first is IPP—perhaps not surprisingly, given what I have just said. In some cases, this simply precludes hope. Although the Minister is making no changes to IPP in this Bill, I am nevertheless very grateful to him for his attention to this, and I detect a genuine concern and a desire to improve the situation. That is as it should be. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, referred to the late and much-missed Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood; we need to sit up and take note when such a legal expert as he was is moved to declare IPP as the single greatest stain on the British judicial system.

As we have heard, the Howard League recommended a change in Parole Board practice so that it sets a definite date for the release of each prisoner within a two-year window, and then specifies what the prisoner must accomplish, with professional support, to achieve that. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, convincingly advocated for a resentencing policy to which I was greatly attracted, and still am.

The IPP sentence was introduced by the former Labour Government in 2003, supposedly to protect the public from dangerous offenders. It was, in effect, a life sentence for those who have not committed serious offences, such as murder, that would usually attract a life sentence. The sentence was abolished by the former coalition Government in 2012, but the abolition did not apply to those who were already serving the sentence. Over a decade after its abolition, some 2,422 prisoners are still shamefully languishing in custody under the sentence.

Dr Alice Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has described the IPP as an “inhumane” punishment that

“often amounts to psychological torture”.

If noble Lords feel that is an overdramatic description, I invite them to imagine themselves in the same position: behind bars, unable to make progress, with no hope of getting out. That is an intolerable situation.

I turn to joint enterprise, which has not really been mentioned in the Bill but which I and many others think should be. There has been growing alarm over Crown Prosecution Service data, from organisations such as Liberty, showing that black people are disproportionately prosecuted under joint enterprise, and that a 2016 Supreme Court ruling that the law had been wrongly implemented for more than 30 years has had “no discernible impact” on the number of prosecutions. In her report, Nisha Waller said:

“Joint enterprise is unjustifiably vague and wide in scope. Law reform will not eradicate institutional racism and broader issues with police and prosecution practice. However, the current law encourages the overcharging of suspects and allows cases to be propelled forward based on poor quality evidence. Prosecutors are then left to fill the gaps with speculative case theories and often racialised narratives from which juries are invited to infer joint responsibility”.


I am sure we can all imagine a young boy, under the influence and maybe in fear of older peers, feeling he must follow his comrades without fully realising the implications of what is happening. I would be very interested to know whether the Minister feels that there is equality proportionate to culpability in cases of joint enterprise. Should this not form part of the Bill?

Finally, I am very sympathetic to those who have argued that prisoners convicted of domestic abuse or stalking, and who have been recalled, will not have thrown off that obsessive behaviour after 56 days. That is a really important point.