Sentencing Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is extremely difficult to speak after two such very powerful speeches. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, has advanced again the resentencing option which was originally proposed by the Justice Select Committee in the other place, under the chairmanship of Sir Bob Neill when he was a Member of Parliament, on a unanimous, cross-party basis. It therefore cannot be dismissed as some reckless and trivial proposal; it should be taken with great seriousness. However, I am not going to elaborate further on it now because it has been debated already. The noble Lord has an extant Private Member’s Bill which would give it effect.

It is fair to say that the proposal from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, is new at debate in your Lordships’ House and it emanates, as he said, from a report produced by the Howard League. There are two points in what the noble and learned Lord said that I want to present in my own way. The first relates to the action plan, which has been excellent in many ways. It has achieved a great deal but, as I said at Second Reading, the difficulty with it is that there is a large number of people—nobody can put a figure on it, but consensually there is an idea that it is several hundreds, maybe nearly 1,000—who are the hard cases left after the action plan has done its work and has resolved the issues in relation to the, if you like, low-hanging fruit. We are left with several hundred people for whom it is clear the action plan is never going to be a solution. If there is no other way out for them than the action plan, then, in effect, the Government are saying that they will stay in jail until they die, because what else is there? There is no other route out.

The noble and learned Lord has presented a proposal which would help. The process would be that the prisoner would apply for parole, be refused parole, but then the Parole Board would at that point be obliged to set a date, up to two years later, on which the prisoner would be released.

The second point is that it could be represented that this is, in effect, an automatic release that follows two years after they have failed to achieve release—but that is not the wording of the amendment. I draw noble Lords’ attention to proposed new subsection (5), inserting new Section 28(6B), which says that the Parole Board, having set the date,

“may issue such directions to facilitate the prisoner’s release at the specified future date as it considers necessary having regard to its duty to protect the public”.

This is not a reckless and automatic release that follows without any effort on anybody’s part from the decision to refuse parole. The essential idea is that the machinery of the Probation Service should be brought together and energised under the direction of the Parole Board to provide those tailored services and that tailored support, such as education and courses, and the other measures that are necessary to ensure that that person is safe to be released. That is the objective.

Let us remember that many of the people who will not be released through the action plan are in that group because they have ceased to engage with the system. Having been through the effort to achieve parole in the past and having suffered the severe psychological blow that can arise from having been refused and knocked back, many of them will simply not go through that again. But if you could offer them a date, if you could say to them, “Here is hope, in two years, if you do these things”, perhaps we can get that engagement, and perhaps those people for whom there is otherwise no exit could be engaged and brought to be released, with the approval of the Parole Board and the support they need to get them to that place. If that support turns out to be expensive and difficult to provide and requires a superhuman effort on the part of the Prison Service, the Probation Service, the Ministry of Justice and the other organs of the state, is that not the least we owe those people now? That is why I really hope that noble Lords will be able to support the amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord, and that the Government will be able to relent. It might need some work in detail, but I hope the whole House will be able to support the principle behind it.

Briefly, there are also amendments in this group, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, which relate to the parallel—and in some senses, almost deeper —scandal of DPP prisoners. Noble Lords will be aware that, in essence, the only difference between DPP and IPP prisoners is that DPP prisoners were sentenced when they were under 18. Those people are still in prison. They almost certainly should not be, but they are. The amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, deserve support.

Finally, and I feel this is very much an anticlimax, my own Amendment 109 is almost bloodless in its technical insignificance in comparison with those put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. It is a very modest proposal and entirely administrative. I very much hope that the Minister will support it.

The amendment would allow IPP prisoners, who are in the community already serving a licence, annually to apply to the Parole Board for the discharge of that licence. In the Victims and Prisoners Act, we reduced dramatically the statutory period of the licence, and we made it easier for people to be discharged. Hundreds of prisoners have had their licence terminated as a result of that; it has been the most significant step so far in removing the scandal of IPP prisoners.

However, there are administrative difficulties, whereby if someone misses out on their discharge, they have to wait another whole two years before they can be considered again. What I am simply doing in my amendment is introducing the idea that they could apply—I would expect nobody to do this, unless they were supported by their probation officer—after one year, not two years, to have their licence discharged.

There is no threat to the public in this. We must remember that these people are already living in the community, and all the amendment seeks to do is give them permission to apply for something. The decision whether to discharge their licence finally—not to release them from jail, because they are in the community already—would still rest with the Parole Board. There is no risk to the public at all in doing this. It is a modest administrative change that will help some—not many—prisoners get rid of the stigma of this sentence sooner and resume their lives in the community as free subjects.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, my contribution this evening will be brief, only because there is a long evening ahead for the many noble Lords on the Front Bench and no lack of enthusiasm and commitment to continue working with other noble Lords who have spoken this evening to get this mess sorted out. I thank my noble friend Lord Woodley, who has taken up the cudgel so strongly; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, whose commitment could not be doubted after his contribution this evening; and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who has hunted with me for a very long time now—since I first came to your Lordships’ House, it seems.

Before speaking to my Amendments 116 and 117, I note that the three contributions that have been made already illustrate the urgency of getting this matter resolved once and for all. All three Members have put their finger on one of the tragedies of the IPP sentence, which, ironically, was in part intended to deal with the two strikes that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, mentioned. The tragedy reflected in the action plan wording that the noble and learned Lord read out—what was originally intended was never in the Bill itself; it was a matter of interpretation—was one of the terrible twists of life that we now have to untangle. The main issue I have picked out concerns those people who have been in prison for so long that their mental health has inevitably deteriorated. As the noble and learned Lord said, psychiatrists have accepted that now, in a way that was not recognised in 2003—we should have done that, and they should have done that, but we did not.

On the amendments from my noble friend Lord Woodley and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, I believe that, if we could build in a formula that allowed the transfer of some of those prisoners to a secure medical setting for support to be given—I am not talking about Broadmoor or Rampton; there needs to be an intermediary alternative—then it might be possible to accept the two-year imperative. That would go a long way to meeting what my noble friend is seeking to achieve in his amendment: to move this on rapidly. The commitment to help from my noble friend on the Front Bench is unequalled, and I pay tribute to him. Listening and responding from the Front Bench is not easy—I know that, because I was there for eight years and experienced all kinds of constraints. My noble friend understands what we are talking about, so perhaps, with some creativity, we could think of a way to achieve this aim.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I hesitate to interrupt, but does the noble Lord accept that, in many cases, especially in the early part of the IPP regime, judicial discretion was almost nil? It was not that the judge determined that an IPP sentence was appropriate; rather, the guidelines given to him said that in certain circumstances, where the offence for which the person had been found guilty and an earlier offence for which they had been convicted appeared on a certain table in a certain configuration, they had no choice but to give an IPP sentence. That is how the sentence was imposed in many cases. There were circumstances where two people were prosecuted for the same crime, which they had carried out together. One of them had a history which brought this table into operation, the other did not. One would get an IPP sentence, the other a determinate sentence appropriate to that crime, although they had both been involved. That point, which is of capital importance, has never been fully recognised by the Ministry of Justice. Judicial discretion was not exercised or exercisable in the case of many of these sentences.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Before my noble friend on the Front Bench replies, could he also reflect that this took place on a Court of Appeal ruling two years after the implementation of the Act in 2005? That judgment then determined the hearings and therefore the sentences granted by judges, consequent on that Appeal Court ruling.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords for their helpful comments, which explain why this is such a difficult and important area. We need to keep the public safe, but we also need to keep working as noble Lords to try to do what we can to address this situation.

I welcome the thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, on the importance of supporting IPP offenders.