Sentencing Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 7 to 11. I support the amendments in the names of my noble friend Lord Sandhurst and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen, particularly Amendments 6 and 18 to 29.

I fully understand the need to address the issue of prison capacity and overcrowding. We are now in a position where we have 97.3% capacity and 86,800 prisoners, as at 3 November this year. I think we are all committed to tackling recidivism and to improving prisoner education and rehabilitation; I know the Minister has a personal commitment and an enviable record in that respect. I support the wider aim of delivering 14,000 additional prison places by 2031, given that, at present, we will be 9,500 places short by 2028. I am one of the few people who has actually read the Independent Sentencing Review by my erstwhile friend and former colleague David Gauke, which is an excellent piece of work.

I notice that the Government are no longer propagating the disingenuous statistic and canard that the previous Government, who struggled with Covid, Ukraine and other contingent financial problems, created only 500 places. For the record, they created 8,500 places and opened three new prisons: HMP Five Wells, HMP Fosse Way and HMP Millsike. Unfortunately, due to the decrepit physical condition of the prison estate, presided over by both parties, the previous Government, cheered on by His Majesty’s Opposition at the time and prisoner advocacy charities, were compelled to take many prison places out of use. Some 4,151 cells have been closed due to dilapidation since 2010, according to the PAC report on prison capacity published in March this year.

I have two major concerns regarding the proposals in Clause 1 that give rise to my amendments, which in practice would de facto abolish prison terms under 12 months. They send out a regrettable message to criminals and the wider public that, because of government incompetence, a failure to plan and a failure of imagination, committing crime is cost free. Shoplifters, burglars, thieves, fences, thugs and drug dealers will be spared jail and instead will receive a community sentence. Even someone given an 18-month sentence for a serious crime, with a credit of a guilty plea taken into account and a reduction to 12 months, will receive no custodial jail time at all.

I shall focus on Amendment 7, concerning these rather wrongheaded proposals. The Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018 was introduced by a Labour MP and supported by the Labour Front Bench and the GMB union, whose national officer said at the time:

“It’s welcome to see arrests taking place but we also want to see an increase in prosecutions and tougher sentences handed down for these unacceptable assaults”.


The Bill was supported by many senior Labour MPs, including, for instance, Louise Haigh, then a Front-Bencher, who said that the attitude

“sadly exists across the criminal justice system, that being punched and kicked is somehow to be expected and accepted … we will never accept that people should be assaulted while they are doing their job and we will do everything in our power to protect them”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/10/17; col. 1150.]

Under these proposals we have a situation where around 3,000 thugs—who assaulted police officers, NHS workers, firefighters and ambulance staff, among others—will receive a golden ticket: a free pass. What message does that send to the public and to those public servants who do these very tough jobs? The criminal justice system is distrusted by many taxpayers already. Will that improve as a result of this legislation?

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[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I understand why we have all got a problem with the size of the prison population. Generally, we could be safer if there were fewer people in prison. Many of them have probably been there too long and not had an awful lot done to help them. But as I have tried to understand the Government’s proposals and public spending generally, I have a growing concern about how they might be improved.

The proposals rely on the fact that, as people are released early or do not go to prison, they are tagged. I generally agree with tagging and think that we could do far more with it. At the moment, we do not do much with geofencing, with which we can stop a person going where a victim of domestic violence might be. There is sobriety tagging—where alcohol is the cause of somebody’s offending, you can check whether they are abiding by a court order not to drink or not to take drugs. These are positive developments. I am told that about 30% of the people leaving prison who should be tagged are not getting tagged because of administrative issues. That is a significant number of those who are leaving prison who should have some form of restraint or monitoring. If that is not happening, it needs to be sorted before we start allowing people out at a quicker rate.

The other opportunity with tagging which we are not currently taking—Ministers have been kind enough to find some time to talk with me about this—is how we might proactively use it better in the future. The data that comes from the tags goes to the commercial operators of the tagging system. I am not sure whether it is G4S, but it is a commercial operator. I have no problem with that. The problem is that the data goes into its control room and the police do not see it. It tells us where the offenders are; we might be able to check, for example, whether there is a rapist nearby to a rape or a burglar nearby to a burglary—real-time data sharing. At the moment, that is not happening, but it is an opportunity that could be taken with this new experiment. It would not take an awful lot of investment or time to get this running.

Further, as one or two people have said already, we could probably have fewer short sentences on the whole but I am not sure that they should be removed, as it appears the assumption is here, from the armoury of the judge. The particular group I would consider are those repeat offenders who commit low-level offending, but if you live next door to them it is not very good. Such cases are perceived as minor cases, but they often impact on their neighbours and the community where they live—they do not impact on people who live 20 miles away. The opportunity for a judge to intervene in those cases ought to remain. I worry that, with the assumption based on the Government’s proposal, that group, for example, would not get caught.

I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, that the list offered by the Opposition is entirely the right one. It would force the Government to address what should be on the list, or, if not a list, what should be the principle to guide such action by a judge. I worry that, at the moment, judges may feel constrained not to give short sentences in circumstances where they are the only method. It is no good giving a fine to somebody who has repeatedly been given fines and does not pay them, as an example. I think we need to retain that in the armoury.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Is not the corollary of the noble Lord’s argument that, as it stands, if the Government were to reject these amendments, in cases of serious and egregious crime the judge may be fully cognisant of the fact that they cannot give a custodial sentence to someone who is deserving of one, and therefore will give a higher sentence than 12 months, with the result that prison overcrowding will be made worse? That is a risk if these amendments are not supported.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, is quite right. In fact, that is one thing I would mention to the Minister about the risk, because judges will try to do what is best. They are not trying to subvert the law, but they will try to do what is best in the case before them.

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[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

We will come back to that later in Committee, when we talk about the Sentencing Council. But I reassure the noble and learned Lord that I will take back to colleagues his point about clarity and simplicity.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I do not think that simple legislation will ever catch on, because it would put a lot of lawyers out of business—I say rather irreverently. The Minister in his remarks did not specifically address my Amendment 7. The piece of legislation put forward by his honourable friend Sir Chris Bryant, the emergency workers offences Act, had significant support across both the other place and here. Given the impact of these proposals, I wonder whether the Minister would revisit the specific ramifications for emergency service workers, because there is significant concern about that. I take the point that we should not specify in too much detail in primary legislation, but that Act did receive significant support.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for raising the point about emergency workers: they deserve all our attention and we are very proud of what they do in often very difficult circumstances. I will take away his challenge on that.

I have met a number of people—especially women—in prison who are there for assaulting an emergency worker. While those assaults should not happen at all, often those people were in a very traumatic situation and, when the emergency services came to their aid, they reacted in the wrong way. That is something we need to bear in mind as well.

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[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. To build on that, more needs to be done for the community and voluntary organisations that, sitting alongside this Bill, will help build the capacity to deliver, so that the rates he outlined will be increased. Policy examples include multi-year, unrestricted grant funding and regional commissioning.

I return to the amendment. By being more explicit in the Bill about the central role that rehabilitative activity plays, my hope is that the Government would be forced to resource this area sufficiently and signal that they view these services and programmes as essential, rather than discretionary.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the names of my noble friends on the Front Bench. Some 14 years ago, I travelled to San Miguel prison in Santiago, Chile, which was one of the worst prisons in South America. I had the dubious distinction of travelling often with the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, who is a noted prison campaigner. When I travelled with her, she invariably asked me to accompany her to a prison. She would regale me with the greatest hits of the worst prisons in the world. Her choice was Kingston prison, in Jamaica. At San Miguel, in Santiago, we saw the results of a system that was overly concentrating on punitive actions and did nothing on education, training and rehabilitation. In fact, a few weeks before, 81 prisoners had died in a fire following a riot in that prison. Over the course of a few years, I visited the toughest prisons in Honduras and El Salvador. I can tell the Committee that they were not Pontins holiday camp in any respect.

The serious point, our earlier debates notwithstanding, is that if we accept the importance of suspended sentences and the fact that, according to Ministry of Justice figures, incarcerating a person in the prison estate costs £53,801 a year, then the state has an obligation to provide those individuals in the criminal justice system with endemic, underlying problems—drink and drug misuse, poor family background and poor education, skills and training—with an alternative way out of recidivism.

I have a great deal of respect for the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, particularly the work he has done on problem betting and gambling. I look forward to our debates on that issue in this Bill. He has been rather shy in neglecting to mention the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 that arose from the coalition Government. The Minister and others will know that, prior to the Act—which was groundbreaking legislation —prisoners were turfed out of prison on Friday evening with £46 and within a few hours were in the company of ne’er-do-wells, drug-dealers and others who were leading them back to a life of crime. That was the beginning of rehabilitation being taken seriously for offenders who were not at the top end of seriousness in their offences: there was drug testing and a need to attend appointments; specific, targeted help for young people; the beginning of rehabilitation activity requirement as a policy; and bespoke treatment for female offenders, which is something I know the Minister cares deeply about.

I welcome this amendment and the imperative of the wording. While it is important to respect the discretion of the judiciary, to put in the Bill a requirement that we use that time in as efficacious a way as possible, to ensure that those who have the most acute problems and who will cause the most acute problems, as my noble friend Lady Porter put it—

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

It is not so much that I dissent from what my noble friend is saying, but a mandatory requirement on the judge implies the capacity to fulfil that requirement. I can imagine circumstances in which the Probation Service would not be able to fulfil a particular requirement. In that event, the trial judge might feel that he or she could not impose a suspended sentence because they could not impose the required obligation to fulfil the condition.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My noble friend makes a fair point. However, it could be put the other way, like the chicken and the egg. Putting this as an imperative in the Bill would oblige the Probation Service and other organisations, such as the NHS and community trusts, to raise their game to provide those services.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

That may be so, but that takes you back to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Foster, was making: the fact that there is not capacity in many of the required services.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I understand the point that my noble friend is making—

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

Perhaps I can help the noble Lord a little in his answer to his noble friend. I am sure he has seen that later on the agenda there are a number of amendments in my name and those of others in the Committee proposing that the Bill not be allowed to go ahead until we have evidence of sufficient numbers of prison officers and in the Probation Service. That might be the way out of his dilemma.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I do not often get in-flight refuelling from the Liberal Democrat Benches, but I am grateful that it has happened on this occasion. If I had my way, I would encourage the Government to develop education and training plans, in primary legislation, for each individual prisoner in the prison estate.

As the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, has said, this is a wide area for debate. This amendment begins that debate by trying to encourage the Government to put processes in place in the Probation Service and other key stakeholders to assist prisoners. If someone is in a position where they have already been given a suspended sentence, it seems very sensible, in terms of opportunity cost and saving the taxpayer significant amounts of money in the long term, to have a position where education, training, drug treatment and other areas of work are not just encouraged but mandatory. On that basis, I surely support my noble friend’s excellent amendment.