Sentencing Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

I have Amendment 141A in this group, probing the position with regard to people who have been victims or survivors of modern slavery, human trafficking or domestic abuse.

The large majority of black and minoritised migrant women in contact with the criminal justice system are survivors of human trafficking and/or violence against women and girls. This often happens when a trafficker or abuser identifies their vulnerability, often resulting from unmet basic needs such as housing, income and healthcare. Their criminal convictions will have stemmed very often from the abuse they have suffered, and whether they were coerced into offending or acting under the influence of unaddressed trauma.

In the case of women, particularly, who have been trafficked, we know that the section—I forget the number—in the Modern Slavery Act that seeks to protect them is not working well. The very fact of deportation adds to the vulnerability to abuse; it often leaves the person subject to it without accommodation or income, and it removes community and support networks, in many cases leaving them in a place they are not familiar with. The risk of deportation has a similar effect. A person may be left without ways in which to meet their basic needs and in fear, and the fear itself adds to the vulnerability, which is capitalised on by abusers. This is particularly true for people who are already traumatised by previous abuse and exploitation.

We know that victims of human trafficking and modern slavery—and victims of domestic abuse—need specialist support and protection from re-exploitation and further abuse. I have used the term “she” because very often, mostly, it is a she. We know too that women have particular needs, largely stemming from their own backgrounds.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in my name. I will also briefly comment on the excellent remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame. I too have great sympathy with his comments and have read the interesting article that Richard Ekins KC produced in the Spectator on 11 August. The noble Lord outlines the case very eloquently and I am minded to support his amendment because it is logical and sensible. It really goes to the heart of a philosophical debate about whether the Government’s proposals essentially forget the raison d’être of rehabilitation, re-education and punishment. If the system is predisposed just to deport someone then you are not really concentrating on some key aspects of the criminal justice system with regard to incarceration. The noble Lord’s comments and amendment are therefore logical.

I do not agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. I think that, as usual, her heart is in the right place but, in this case, her amendment would gum up the system and be misused by, in my opinion, activist judges to prevent the deportation of people who should be deported for the public good, safety and security. I therefore cannot support it.

I will not dwell too long on Amendment 142. It is pretty straightforward and the hour is late, but I do want to discuss at reasonable length my Amendment 146. We are now reaching the end of the Bill; we are on Part 4 and Clause 42, which is on the deportation of foreign national offenders. My amendment seeks to ensure that all British citizens, including those in Northern Ireland, can rely on their Government and their sovereign Parliament in Westminster to enact legislation on their behalf, including Clause 42, which was passed without vote, as I understand, in the other place.

However, due to the iniquitous and unfair Windsor Framework and the capitulation by the previous Government—of my party, sadly—in putting it into legislation, thereby making Northern Ireland an effective colony of the European Union, this legislation will not apply to Northern Ireland. Its people, who are British citizens, subjects of the Crown and taxpayers, will again be treated as second-class citizens as a result of this Bill, if my amendment is not accepted. Article 2(1) of the Windsor Framework effectively disregards the will of the sovereign Parliament of the United Kingdom, of this unitary state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in favour of a foreign legal entity and a foreign jurisdiction—laws over which residents of Northern Ireland have no say and whose fundamental rights are circumscribed; they do not have equal citizenship with UK citizens in England, Wales and Scotland.

These people are subject to the direct effect of Union law—European Union law, made in a foreign Parliament, designed by a faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy and unelected politicians who appoint each other—by virtue of Section 7A of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which gives direct effect to such provisions automatically as part of UK domestic law, subject to those EU provisions. This, of course, trumps all UK domestic law, for the Supreme Court has opined:

“The answer to any conflict between the Protocol”—


that is, the Windsor Framework—

“and any other enactment whenever passed or made is that those other enactments are to be read and have effect subject to the rights and obligations which are to be recognised and available in domestic law by virtue of section 7A(2)”.

Yes, a Conservative Government legislated to make UK law permanently subservient to EU law in a significant part of the United Kingdom. In fact, this affects 300 areas of law across every aspect of life in Northern Ireland.

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[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I will write to the noble Baroness with exact details. I have quite a few details in my head, but I want to get it right, so I will write.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Very briefly, my Lords, I want to thank the Minister for his very helpful, illuminating and quite reassuring answer, which those of us who spoke to Amendment 146 are grateful for.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his answer. I too would like to hear more about prisoner transfer agreements. They are the best policy solution in this area, so I am glad to hear that the Government are still pursuing that route. On whether the three-year limit is more or less restrictive, it is true that it does not feature in the legislation currently, but the key element of the current regime is that foreign offenders have to serve 50% of the custodial part of their sentence. That 50% has been reduced to 30% following the statutory instrument a few weeks ago, but Clause 32 would reduce the 30% to zero. In that context, the three-year limit would not be more restrictive.

However, with that in mind, I very much look forward to the Minister’s letter dealing with the other questions that I raised. I hope that he will be able in due course to meet me and others who are interested in this amendment to discuss what to do on Report. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Sentencing Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, rehabilitative activities, activities designed to reduce reoffending—whatever we call them; I do not disagree with my noble friend that what we call them is important—and treatments are often provided by the third sector. A lot of what is provided is excellent, but it is not enough, and it is not consistent across the country. The third sector’s role was acknowledged by David Gauke in his review.

We hear success stories, for instance of a middle-aged woman whose alcoholism was treated after she had been convicted several times for relatively low-level offences. She ceased offending when the alcoholism was treated and was able to lead an ordered life. I think too of a young man who, time after time, failed to connect with his probation officers. Then he found one—or she found him—whom he trusted. That enabled him to take proper advantage of the support that was available. Those are two examples of people the Justice and Home Affairs Committee met before my noble friend joined it.

I know the Minister knows all this, and he knows much more than I do, but I tabled this amendment because regional disparities are substantial and funding needs are acute. A friend of mine refers to some of these organisations as having something that is almost similar to an eating disorder—they simply do not have enough. That is not a very good way of putting it, but they are so hampered by lack of funding. It must be very difficult to work for one of these organisations, knowing that you can never do enough. I do not advocate that all services should be provided by the state, but it is a very sorry position that we are so reliant on voluntary charitable organisations, which are struggling to keep going—not always successfully.

As to Amendment 139B, my noble friend Lord Marks will say more about reporting on reoffending, giving comparative details between offenders who have completed community and custodial sentences. I would be surprised if that is not available to the MoJ now. Because one wants to see sentences that work and maintain the trust of the public in the operation of the justice system—we are becoming like a stuck record in mentioning the public’s trust—the more information in the public domain, the better.

I think Amendment 93A from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, is in a similar vein, though I do not come to the same conclusion about an automatic sunset of the Act. I beg to move.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in my name in this group. The Committee will be delighted to know that I do not intend to go into detail on Amendment 86 as I think it is quite straightforward and others may wish to discuss it, including my noble friends on the Front Bench, but I do intend to elucidate on my Amendments 93A and 127.

The point of this group is transparency in the criminal justice system. The second of my amendments, Amendment 93A, is about the efficacy of reforms to community services. I tabled the amendment, which, incidentally—it goes without saying—is a probing amendment, because it is important to test, over a period of time, the efficacy of the quite substantial and radical policy changes that these clauses give rise to. It is a probing amendment that challenges the Government to account for the success or otherwise of these proposals.

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[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, I too am keen that we should, generally speaking, trust the public. But Amendment 86 requires

“all offenders convicted and sentenced in the Crown Court or Magistrates’ courts”

to have their

“country of birth … nationality … ethnicity … immigration status, and … the offence(s) for which they were sentenced”

recorded, published and laid before Parliament. That could encourage the drawing of entirely the wrong conclusions by the British public.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I seem to recollect that the noble Lord’s party supported, for instance, the Lammy Review, which looked at sentencing and led, by a circuitous route, to the decision of the Sentencing Council to fall out somewhat spectacularly with the former Lord Chancellor. His party has also supported the use of quite detailed empirical data around stop and search, which is looked at through the prism of race and ethnicity. What is so different? Is there a particular kind of empirical data that he does not think that the public should be made aware of, or is he just saying that this a poor amendment for the sake of it? It seems to me that the rationale is that you collect as much data as possible, you have an evidence-led approach to the policy and then you can design the legislation in the appropriate way.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord and the noble Baroness about the collection of data. What I am concerned about is the mandatory publication of all data, which risks being misused.

The noble Lord is quite right to suggest that my party supported Lammy. Indeed, I spent some time in this Chamber in debates on the sentencing guidelines Bill reminding the House of the Lammy Review on the inequality of outcomes based on ethnicity. That is quite different from saying that every single offence needs to be reported on and published, which can lead to unfortunate reporting.

Turning to Amendment 93B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, like the noble Viscount, Lord Hogg, not only did I agree with almost every word she said, but I agreed with it profoundly in the sense of the benefits of participation in education, training and purposeful activity. I just have some concern about the use of the word “mandatory”.

In principle, all those things are sensible and beneficial for all the reasons that the noble Baroness gave. However, as we in this House know, many prisoners are struggling with addiction and mental health issues and some with problems of aging and illness. For those prisoners, the prospect of education, training, work and purposeful activity may be nugatory. I worry about too much use of “mandatory” in these contexts without consideration of all the effects. What is important, as it was in the last group when we considered probation, is flexibility and a personal approach so that offenders are dealt with having regard to their personal needs. That is an additional point to the one made by the noble Viscount, Lord Hogg, who talked about the availability of particular training opportunities—which were important as well.

On Amendment 127, I say yes to transparency of the Parole Board. Generally, the proceedings of the Parole Board should be public, should be heard and should be considered. Reporting of them is a good thing. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that there may be material that needs to be private. In these hearings, some discretion must be applied to enable the Parole Board to receive and take note of material that should not necessarily be made public. The hearing should make that decision. However, in general, the principle of transparency is one with which I and my party agree.

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[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

It is only one of the factors included. I did not mean to select just that. I was using it as shorthand for what is in my noble friend Lord Jackson’s amendment, which includes country of birth—which I suggest is relevant—and nationality.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I beg the indulgence of the Committee to specifically answer the reasonable point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bach. There is and has been for many years significant concern about the overpolicing of some communities. That has given rise to a number of key initiatives, including the police action plan, which the noble Lord with his great expertise is well aware of. That is based on the collection and collation of data around ethnicity. You cannot have one without the other, I am afraid.

Therefore, to keep the faith and trust that taxpayers have in the criminal justice system, one has to collect as much data as possible. If one collects it to prevent overpolicing, one should also collect it for other reasons, so that you have a clear, transparent system.

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

There is quite a lot to cover in this group. My noble friend has made the point. We never suffer from having too much information. If it is collected in bits and pieces, there is the danger of distortion.

The report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, exposed a decade-long data collapse and made it clear that this should not carry on any longer. This is an area in which we have dragged our feet for too long. The majority of OECD countries have mandatory reporting statutes. The fact is that the United Kingdom does not do the same, and that is no help to anyone other than the offenders.

We need to do something to implement the recommendations from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. The amendment would give forces the necessary data to record, analyse and respond to different dynamics in different communities. Publishing data would prove to the public that the Government are not concerned with accusations of bigotry but focused on outcomes. These are clear benefits in this amendment for noble Lords’ efforts to tackle crime and reduce reoffending. I hope the Minister has considered it carefully.

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[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I too am intrigued and concerned as to how these conditions will be monitored and enforced. I did not support the amendments that are aimed at the same question in the previous group, because I do not think we should make, for instance, the licensee of a pub or the operator of a sports ground the enforcer of conditions. Many of us have been critical enough, in the area of immigration, about making landlords and so on enforcers of government legislation. But I think there is still a lot to explore in this.

I said that I assumed the answer was going to be electronic monitoring, but how is that to be done, unless we are requiring the offender to be confined to a particular place—to home, for instance? They are not as strict as that; they exclude certain events. So does somebody need to know where events—an Oasis concert, a Premier League match or a fringe theatre with a tiny capacity—are taking place? How is this actually checked? The Minister said that the probation officer will get the data from a tag. I do not know enough about how these work to know whether the probation officer can easily find out whether somebody has attended a Sheffield United match. How is that actually done in practice on a day-to-day basis? Does the probation officer have the GPS co-ordinates for everything that might be an issue? It would be helpful if we could understand more about this.

I am concerned about live facial recognition—if it is being used; I do not know whether it will be. It works on the basis of a watch list, which is created for a particular occasion but then, as I understand it, will be deleted; it is not something which would go on for several months. I had thought that live facial recognition was only for the period of surveillance. I am asking for much more briefing on this, which we would then want to be in the public domain, but we need to understand it first.

My noble friend Lord Marks will be speaking to our Amendment 106, but I cannot overemphasise the importance of this amendment, or something like it. The objective is reducing reoffending, so one must enable employment, education, rehabilitation programmes and so on. We know from the experience of other orders that, for instance, the requirement to report to a police station can be imposed with absolutely no regard to the demands on an individual, who is then forced to take a day off work. I am interested to hear how enforcement works with the support for the offender, which is implicit in the activities.

My noble friend Lord Foster of Bath, in making the overarching point about necessity and proportionality, has hit on what is, to my mind, a very important point. I wish I had thought of it, but I support him in this. I beg to move Amendment 60.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 61, 66, 102 and 104, standing in my name. I find myself in the unusual position of broadly agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on Amendment 60.

This is an example of what I suppose could be called legislative drag, where time has elapsed between the publication of legislation—in this case, Second Reading in the Commons was at the beginning of September—and real-life events today. I want to talk about the broader context of how these proposals and policies may have an impact, in particular on the hospitality sector.

In principle, we do not oppose the creation of new tools to protect the public or manage offenders, but their success, as other noble Lords have said, depends significantly on enforceability. Clauses 14 and 15 lack any operational detail on how the bans on pub or event attendance organisations will be implemented or enforced, making them currently unworkable in practice. It is unrealistic and unfair to expect pubs, bars, off-licences and event venues to police court-ordered bans without a clear enforcement structure. The hospitality sector is already in severe financial distress, and I will return to that shortly. If enforcement is not intended to fall on venues, the Government must explain how probation and policing will manage compliance, given existing resources and the staffing crises that we discussed on day one of Committee.

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[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, on 20 September there were 26,647 people subject to electronic monitoring, with various types of tags and for a range of different purposes. It has been estimated that this Bill will increase the number of people being tagged by an additional 20,000. In other words, it will more or less double the number of people being tagged.

In our deliberations, we have already heard the Minister make it clear that his understanding is that the vast majority of people who leave prison will be among those 20,000 people. Although it is true that there is guidance which says:

“Offenders released from prison will enter a period of ‘intensive supervision’ tailored to their risk and the type of crime”,


it acknowledges that probation officers will be allowed some discretion as to whether all prisoners leaving will be tagged. My real concern is that probation officers who have heard the Minister say that the vast majority of prisoners will be tagged are going to end up tagging the vast majority of prisoners. That is why I have tabled Amendment 110ZA, the purpose of which is to require

“the relevant authority, when considering whether to include an electronic monitoring requirement as part of a relevant order, to have regard to whether the requirement is necessary to ensure compliance with the order and whether the requirement is proportionate considering the individual’s circumstances”.

The Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee did an investigation into tagging as it currently stands and looked ahead at what might be coming down the track. We heard a number of worrying bits of evidence. For instance, we heard about a 77 year-old woman recalled to prison simply because there was not a tag small enough to fit her. We heard from many people about the stigma attached while they are wearing a tag, even to the point that people who see the tag—which is pretty obvious in many cases—are frightened and believe they are dangerous. None of this helps them re-establish themselves in their local communities.

We also discovered a number of serious ethical issues. For instance, we found evidence that black people are almost twice as likely to be subjected to electronic monitoring as their white counterparts. Even the Home Office acknowledged this in a 2023 equality impact assessment which acknowledged that GPS tagging may disproportionately affect some nationalities. The MoJ told our committee that it, too, accepted that electronic monitoring might not be suitable for all individuals and addressed issues such as work, childcare commitments and so on.

There are also other measures that are rarely taken into account. One very good example is a prisoner I spoke to who had gone into prison because of his gambling addiction—he had stolen money and gone into prison as a result—and then on release had a curfew order. When he said he wanted to go to a meeting at Gamblers Anonymous, he was told he could not because that took place in the evening when the curfew applied. That seems fairly nonsensical to me.

We concluded as a committee that the MoJ, alongside the judiciary and the Probation Service, should conduct regular reviews to ensure electronic monitoring is being used proportionately across all groups, as well as appropriately among vulnerable groups, in which we highlighted women in particular. In tabling this amendment, I wanted to draw attention to the committee’s concern about the blanket assumption that the vast majority of prisoners would be tagged.

We think this is really important, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, has said. We will also hear similar arguments from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, who has an amendment on this issue in the next group. In group 7, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, will raise the important issue of allowing offenders to have a say in this so that they can point out the impact that a tag of one sort or another may have on their lives—not being able to go to work, childcare issues or whatever. My noble friend on the Front Bench has amendments later on whether driving bans and exclusion zones could impact somebody’s ability to reduce reoffending.

This is simply an opportunity for the Minister to explain that he does not really believe that the vast majority of prisoners will be tagged and that probation officers, with the expertise which he points out they have, will be able to have due discretion over whether tagging or electronic monitoring is appropriate.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I very briefly beg the indulgence of the Committee just to respond to my noble friend Lord Hailsham. It seems that he wishes to will the ends but not the means as regards my Amendments 61 and 66. I am rather surprised he did not know where every pub was in his constituency, because when I was in the other place I knew where every pub was in my constituency. That said, I say to him respectfully that it is perfectly reasonable in terms of data management to utilise the regulatory and the licensing regimes of local authorities to reach every pub and drinking establishment in a geographical area, and certainly within 20 miles. That is not something that is beyond the wit of the Probation Service to work with local authorities so to do.

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[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Prashar, and the noble Lords, Lord Marks, Lord Foster and Lord Jackson, for tabling these amendments.

Amendments 60, 61 and 66 refer to the enforcement of the new community requirements. I hope that the noble Baroness and noble Lord will be satisfied with a summary of the answer I gave in the previous group: responsibility for enforcement sits with the Probation Service, which has a range of options available to respond to non-compliance. This includes returning the offender to court, where they may face further penalties. This can include being sent to custody.

The noble Baroness asked how this works in practice, and I hope I can assist. Where electronic monitoring is imposed, the electronic monitoring service provider will receive an automatic breach notification if the offender breaches a licence condition predetermined by a court or probation officer. They will then provide information on the breach to the individual’s probation officer by 10 o’clock the following morning, for them then to take the appropriate action. If the noble Baroness would like further clarification and to speak to the experts whom I work alongside, I would be very happy to arrange that.

Amendments 102 and 104, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, concern the enforcement of new licence conditions. As with the new community order requirements, the enforcement of licence conditions will mirror current practice. Where it is supervising offenders, the Probation Service will monitor offenders’ behaviour and any potential breach of licence conditions. It will have available to it a suite of options to respond to the breaches, including issuing a warning and increasing supervision; where needed, it also includes recall to custody.

Again, I hope that an example will assist your Lordships. Lucy has recently been released from prison after serving a custodial sentence after seriously assaulting someone in a pub. Her licence condition includes a ban on entering any drinking establishment. After several weeks, Lucy admits to her probation officer that she has frequently been going to pubs and clubs. Even though she has not been arrested, her probation officer decides that more intensive supervision is needed to manage her risk, and puts this in place.

As with community orders, where an offender is on licence, there is no expectation for businesses or venues to manage these conditions. As the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, rightly pointed out, imagine a probation officer, already under pressure, having to notify every pub, bar and venue within 20 miles that certain offenders cannot go there. Imagine businesses having to store securely, monitor and update this information and, by implication, having to be responsible for enforcing these conditions. This is not for venues or people in the community to manage, and it will not help offenders integrate back into their communities. The Probation Service will continue its management and supervision of these offenders; it is best placed to respond to any breaches, including recalling offenders to prison if necessary.

However, we must be clear: we cannot monitor every offender in every moment of every day, and nor should we. Complying with licence conditions is an important way in which offenders can show a reduction in their risk as they reintegrate into their communities. It is how they can rebuild the trust they have lost by committing crimes. The punishment correlates to offending behaviour and the decision of the sentencer who takes into account the nature of the offence.

I hope that this reassures noble Lords and noble Baronesses that these measures will provide our Probation Service with a full suite of options to support it in managing offenders in the community—a task it is best equipped to do. Of course, we are also supporting the Probation Service with more funding, more recruitment and better tools to help it do what it does best: keeping the public safe. We therefore believe that these amendments are unnecessary, and I urge noble Lords to withdraw or not press them.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

With all due respect to the Minister, that is not a great example, because the example he gives is that Lucy has volunteered the information that she is in breach of her licence conditions. Given that the licence conditions are a de facto replacement for potential custodial centres, had she not told the probation officer, she would still have been in breach of the licence conditions as she was still going to the pub. I do not really think that that is a great example, with all due respect to the Minister.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I am happy to provide further examples if that would be helpful but it may be that the tag, if Lucy had had one on, would have been used by the monitoring team to identify where she had or had not been.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for Amendment 106, which would allow for exemptions to restriction zone conditions. I am proud to be a Minister in the Government who introduced this measure. These zones will pin certain offenders down to a specific geographical area to ensure that victims can move freely everywhere else. I must pay tribute to those who campaigned tirelessly for this crucial change, including Diana Parkes and Hetti Barkworth-Nanton.

I hope that it will help your Lordships if I explain in a little more detail how the process of drawing a restriction zone will work. Where a restriction zone is deemed necessary and proportionate to manage risk, probation officers will conduct a detailed risk assessment. They will work closely with victim liaison officers, to ensure that victims have been given the chance to make representations where appropriate, but they must also ensure that offenders can access all necessary services, including employment, with consideration of public protection and risk. They must not be a barrier to employment or prevent rehabilitation; as someone who has championed the employment of ex-offenders for years, noble Lords will know that this is the last thing I would want to happen.

On a recent visit to the Serco office in Warrington, I saw at first hand how exclusion zones are designed. I saw the detailed consideration and care that is given when developing them; I will ensure that the same level of attention is given to restriction zones when those are being drawn, with due consideration given to the needs of both the victim and the offender. Let us be clear: these considerations are inextricably linked. Supporting offenders to rehabilitate and stopping the cycling of reoffending are vital parts of ensuring that restriction zones protect victims. Restriction zones, like all restrictive measures, must accommodate rehabilitative aims, such as employment; that way, we will better protect not just a single victim but all victims.

Amendment 101A from the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, would give the Parole Board oversight of restriction zones. Although I thank the noble Baroness for raising this matter, my firm view is that, as I have set out throughout this speech, the Probation Service is best placed to monitor and request licence conditions; and that the judiciary is best placed to hand out orders.

The Parole Board is best placed to develop risk management plans on release for indeterminate sentence offenders and more serious determinate sentence offenders whose release it directs. It is not for it to do so in cases where offenders are subject to automatic release. If an offender is released automatically without any involvement of the Parole Board, it would be inappropriate for the board then to be asked to approve a restriction zone for an offender whose release it did not direct; it would have no knowledge of the individual and their case. As with current provisions, it is right that the Probation Service will manage the licence for these cases. It is the one who know the offender and the risk they pose best.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for his Amendment 110ZA. I agree that it is important to ensure that electronic monitoring is imposed where it is proportionate and necessary to do so. When an electronic monitoring condition is being considered following an individual’s release from custody, the Probation Service will carry out an extensive assessment of that individual’s circumstances to ensure that electronic monitoring is used appropriately as part of its wider supervision. Conducting these assessments via the professional judgment of our Probation Service remains a core principle to ensuring that electronic monitoring is used only where it is proportionate and necessary. I have full confidence in the checks and decisions taken by the Probation Service, and I have confidence in the technology that is used to enforce any electronic monitoring requirement. I can assure the noble Lord that the electronic monitoring suitability checks currently in place and carried out by the Probation Service are robust; they ensure that the imposition of electronic monitoring will not result in harm to victims or perpetrators.

We are confident that probation officers will continue to impose electronic monitoring where it is proportionate and necessary to do so. I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

Sentencing Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st December 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough]

80: Before Clause 18, insert the following new Clause—
“Sentencing CouncilThe Sentencing Council of England and Wales is abolished.”

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will also oppose Clauses 18 and 19 standing part of the Bill, and I oppose Amendments 81, 82 and 83 in the names of the noble and learned Lords, Lord Burnett of Maldon and Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, for reasons which I will allude to and develop later.

As your Lordships’ Committee will know, the Sentencing Council exceeded its powers earlier this year when it issued the Imposition of Community and Custodial Sentences guidelines, to come into effect on 1 April 2025, in respect of pre-sentence reports, which gave rise to complaints of two-tier justice. This was in respect of individuals from “ethnic, faith and cultural minority groups”. Of course, what we eventually had as a result of the dispute between the late chair of the Sentencing Council and the then Lord Chancellor was the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Act 2025.

I do not propose to relitigate the issues around that legislation because it was primary legislation and there were comprehensive debates in both Houses about it, but it is important to remember that that is context for the debate and discussion on the efficacy and long-term future of the Sentencing Council. Noble Lords will know that that Act got Royal Assent on 20 June this year.

The background was that the Sentencing Council wilfully refused to amend its guidelines, despite being asked to do so by, effectively, this House and the other place, and the Executive and Parliament through the Lord Chancellor. As your Lordships will know, magistrates and the judiciary must follow such guidelines under Section 59 of the Sentencing Act 2020 and Section 120 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. The then Lord Chancellor correctly argued that the newly imposed guidelines represented differential treatment and two-tier justice.

The Sentencing Council is an independent non-departmental body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, and it was created in 2009 and commenced its work in April 2010. As such, it is in the great scheme of things quite a new body—a successor respectively to the Sentencing Advisory Panel and the Sentencing Guidelines Council, both since abolished. The important point is that it is entirely the product of legislation, and that legislation could be repealed as easily as it was created. It was described by Professor Richard Bellamy in 2007 as an example of “political constitutionalism”, whereby the protection of minority rights undermines the protection of majority opinion, leading to its neglect.

The imbroglio over pre-sentence reports illustrates the fundamental issues at the heart of my amendment: judicial independence, and the role of Ministers and Parliament in sentencing policy. While the ability of the judiciary to set, and its role in setting, individual sentences—certainly prior to 1998—has been wide and permissive, Parliament has always had, and should have, a pre-eminent role, the upper limits when sentencing offenders being set through statute, such as Section 1 of the Sentencing Act 2020. That is something Parliament has always been jealous of in terms of its role in the sentencing framework.

Parliament should not involve itself in individual sentencing decisions—that is for trial judges, magistrates and appellate courts—but, quite rightly, it should and does, through Ministers, determine a broad sentencing policy framework. That is the delicate balance between democratic accountability and judicial independence, which the Sentencing Council upset and, frankly, transgressed. In supporting the new guidelines, the Sentencing Council violated the historic and fundamental principle at the heart of our judicial system: equality before the law. Commendably, and to her credit, the then Lord Chancellor—now the Home Secretary—made that point very strongly in the other place and throughout the passage of the legislation there.

The dispute last year pointed to another broader and wider phenomenon leading to a democratic deficit: the decisions of non-departmental public bodies and arm’s-length bodies lack legitimacy and proper accountability to elected Ministers and their electors and taxpayers. To quote the Times leader, which was cited in the other place by my honourable friend Sir Christopher Chope in March 2010,

“arm’s-length bodies … have often been favoured by ministers as a way of distancing themselves from contentious issues … Free of the need to answer to voters, ALBs can go rogue … in the face of public opposition”.

My honourable friend added:

“The Sentencing Council is not unique in being able to ignore the wishes of Ministers and Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/3/25; col. 1452.]


I do not suppose that the Government will support this amendment, but they should certainly commit to ensuring that all further sentencing guidelines produced by the Sentencing Council be confirmed via order in Parliament prior to coming into effect. It should put beyond doubt that ethnicity, race, religion and membership of a “cultural minority” is no longer a factor in determining either a court sentence or pre-sentence reports.

Finally, the amendment focuses on not just the concerns of two-tier justice but democratic accountability, judicial activism, and the proper constitutional balance between the legislative and judicial branches. Fundamentally, we do not need the Sentencing Council. The Court of Appeal, prior to 1998, created judgments and authorities that established a body of case law refining some of the principles of sentencing, to give sentencing judges the ability to make those decisions. There was little or no evidence of sentencing inconsistency or lack of uniformity, of judicial independence being compromised, or of a lack of public support for or understanding of how sentencing works. For those reasons, I beg to move.

[Lord Burnett of Maldon (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps rather surprisingly, I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, in seeking to remove Clause 18—but for polar opposite reasons. The noble Lord seeks to abolish the Sentencing Council; I wish to protect it from interference.

Abolition would be a retrograde step, which would undermine consistency in sentencing and destroy a structure that has evolved over 25 years. It has ensured that both sentences imposed and the impact of those sentences are properly informed by evidence, research and consultation, so I oppose the abolition of the Sentencing Council.

I shall explain why Clause 18, which requires the Sentencing Council to publish a business plan, over which the Lord Chancellor appears to be given control, should not stand part of the Bill. I shall also speak to Amendments 81 to 83 standing in my name, which seek to remove the veto that the Bill puts in the hands of the Lord Chancellor over the publication and introduction of sentencing guidelines.

First, I will spend a couple of minutes outlining the background to the Sentencing Council, to which the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, has made some reference already. The Sentencing Council was established by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. The Act makes provision for 14 members, eight of whom are judicial, ranging from at least one Lord Justice to a magistrate, and six non-judicial, who must be drawn from those with experience of criminal cases in the courts, from policy, from those familiar with sentencing and the interests of victims, and from those who understand statistics and are involved in the academic study of sentencing and rehabilitation of offenders. The DPP, a senior police officer and a victims’ representative are members.

The Sentencing Council produces guidelines or amendments to guidelines in draft, having conducted extensive research. Those drafts are then consulted upon widely and, in particular, both the Justice Committee of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor are statutory consultees. Moreover, and importantly, the Lord Chancellor has a representative, who attends all meetings of the Sentencing Council and may speak at such meetings.

The Sentencing Council is, by statute, charged with monitoring the effect of guidelines in promoting consistency in sentencing and on public confidence. It must report on the effect of its guidelines on prison places and resources for probation. As the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, has noted, courts must follow guidelines unless it is in the interests of justice not to do so.

The Sentencing Council did not spring from nowhere; it was preceded by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, a creature of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. That produced guidelines to which the courts were required to have regard, but it was a much less sophisticated and less well-informed body than the Sentencing Council. Before that, the Sentencing Advisory Panel began work in 1999, and its function was to advise the Court of Appeal when it was considering producing a guideline case.

Before that, the Court of Appeal had no structured help from anywhere. The responsibility for producing guideline cases rested entirely with the Court of Appeal. In fact, they were relatively few and far between, so those who were sentencing offenders had to delve through a four-volume, loose-leaf work, which, from memory, was updated a couple of times a year. What followed was much better.

Clause 18 requires the Sentencing Council to submit a business plan to the Lord Chancellor for approval after the beginning of a financial year, setting out what guidelines it proposes to prepare and identifying its other activities. If the Lord Chancellor approves, the Sentencing Council would be required to publish the business case. At Second Reading I asked what this was all about—what its purpose was and what the consequences would be of a failure of the Lord Chancellor to approve. With respect to the Minister, there was no explanation forthcoming in his response at the end of the debate.

This provision, Clause 18, is, frankly, pointless. Failure to approve would not prevent the Sentencing Council doing what it planned to do. It looks like an attempt at a control mechanism of some sort—or at least a stick to wave over the Sentencing Council. The Sentencing Council is already under a statutory duty to publish an annual report on all its activities at the end of the financial year, with detailed statutory provisions of what must be contained within that report. With the greatest respect to the Government, if they are unable to come up with a coherent explanation, indeed any explanation, of what mischief this clause is designed to remedy and what its intended effect is, it really should not be in the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

That is precisely why we want to engage in further discussion to try to take some of that forward.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I assume that the Minister is indicating that I should withdraw my amendment. This has been a fascinating, fluent and well-argued debate. Obviously, I have been beset by a surfeit of eminent jurists this evening; they certainly gave the lie to the saying that lawyers are the only people in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

The interesting thing is that, although I agree with the noble and learned Lords on the Clause 18 and Clause 19 stand part notices, that is a logical corollary of the fact that I wish to see the abolition of the Sentencing Council and therefore do not find myself coming from the same position. So I am an example of a “push-me pull-me”: I find myself agreeing with their objective but vehemently disagreeing with their rationale and reasoning.

I will quickly say two things. I slightly take issue with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, because it was not just a slightly irrelevant mix-up at the beginning of the year; it was quite a constitutional tempest. It is very unusual for the Government to bring forward emergency legislation, in effect, very quickly as a result of the behaviour or conduct of an arm’s-length body. Serious constitutional ramifications arose from those decisions. Obviously, the Government solved that matter with cross-party support.

I totally agree with the very astute point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie. There is a dichotomy at the heart of this Bill around the interference or otherwise of the Government and the imperatives they are giving to the judiciary. That needs to be resolved by the time this Bill gets Royal Assent.

With all those caveats being ventilated, and bearing in mind, as I predicted, that the Minister was very unlikely to agree with me, I will seek to withdraw my amendment.

I should also say that I of course meant the Times leader of March 2025 and not 2010, for the benefit of the official record; that was an error on my part. With that being said, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 80 withdrawn.

Sentencing Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
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?

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. I welcome the Minister to his place and look forward very much to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Nichols of Selby. I broadly welcome this legislation while regretting its necessity and that we have reached such an unsatisfactory juncture. I am indebted to Policy Exchange for its excellent paper on this issue, Two-Tier Justice.

The impasse between the Lord Chancellor and the Sentencing Council was significant in its problematic challenge to parliamentary sovereignty, its undermining of the faith and trust that the public must have in the judicial system, and the concept of equal treatment under the law. It further undermined the long-established and quite proper constitutional convention of judicial independence and the separation of powers between the judiciary, legislature and the Executive.

The imbroglio arose from the consultation process on the sentencing guidelines, which was over two years in duration and culminated in January this year. The Sentencing Council’s wilful refusal, enunciated in its letter to the Lord Chancellor on 27 March, to amend its proposed guidelines demonstrated an obtuse disregard for democratic proprieties and quite legitimate criticisms of its actions in formalising two-tier sentencing and differential treatment by the courts based on membership of ethnic, faith and cultural minorities. This is at a time when the public are acutely aware and particularly mindful of fairness and appropriateness, or otherwise, in a number of high-profile criminal cases as reported in the media. This issue transcends party-political differences. It is about whether an elected Parliament and Government Ministers who are accountable to the electorate should be pre-eminent in setting policy in judicial and relevant related matters.

It is appropriate to make the point that pre-sentence reports are a vital tool for magistrates and judges, not least in securing a more comprehensive assessment of an offender and balancing the decision to impose a non-custodial sentence or a term of imprisonment. The previous 2017 imposition guidelines quite rightly made no reference to different cohorts that should receive a pre-sentence report. The new guidelines reference gender, ethnicity, pregnancy, transgender status, and addiction issues, as well as domestic abuse, modern slavery, grooming and other exploitation issues.

The automatic granting of a pre-sentence report to some groups but the availability of only discretionary powers to others was and is wrong. These proposals were divisive, racist and corrosive towards community cohesion. Essentially, if you are a white man who is not religious, you are, or were, under a material and substantive disadvantage in the proposed sentencing regime. The Lord Chancellor was right to highlight this in her letter to the chairman of the Sentencing Council, Lord Justice William Davis, on 6 March.

The fundamental question is: why were these new rules proposed, and on what evidential basis? The Sentencing Council’s 2023 Review of Trend Analysis of the Sentencing Council’s Imposition of Community and Custodial Sentences Guideline found that

“for those groups with larger volumes of offenders sentenced, there is predominantly no clear evidence of differential impacts of the Imposition guideline”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was surely right to state:

“The correct constitutional position would be ... that a judge already has tools at their disposal to seek pre-sentencing reports and that they … do so based on an individual case on a case-by-case basis, rather than categorising certain groups”.


Indeed, we have existing primary legislation in place to allow judges to discharge their duties quite properly, with appropriate evidential discretion, via the Sentencing Act 2020.

The Sentencing Council consultation was flawed and inappropriate, dominated as it was by liberal, self-serving and partisan groups that disregarded the wider societal need for a criminal justice system which is fair, impartial, open and transparent. For the avoidance of doubt, it is not for a judge, however eminent, to unilaterally determine sentencing policy, especially when the Lord Chancellor objects. Parliament has never legislated for it, and it is clear that it is for the judiciary to interpret and apply the law and not to formulate policy on an ad hoc basis. It is for Parliament to set overarching sentencing policy and criminal justice policy while remaining aloof from sentencing of individual offenders by trial judges and magistrates—that also goes for the appellate courts.

So Lord Justice Davis’s rationale in interpreting the role of the Sentencing Council was erroneous. In his letter to the Secretary of State for Justice, Lord Justice Davis referred to the consultation process, stating:

“It was decided that to remove the list would have been contrary to the majority view expressed by consultees”.


That “majority view” among the consultees, that there should be a specified list of groups that automatically receive a pre-sentence report, is unsurprising. The consultation process received 150 responses, 40 of which came from charity or non-governmental organisations. They have every right, and perhaps a duty—organisations such as the Prison Reform Trust, Clinks, the Centre for Women’s Justice and the Howard League for Penal Reform are perfectly entitled—to put forward their views but the Sentencing Council should perhaps have had a more balanced view rather than looking just at the majority of opinion in this particularly niche and narrow consultation.

I think the role of the Government, Ministers and Parliament was misunderstood by the eminent Lord Justice Davis. He questioned whether it was in the power of the Minister to amend Section 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 in respect of proposing to the Sentencing Council that a sentencing guideline be prepared or revised by the council, and whether it was appropriate in this case. Although the legal advice that Lord Justice Davis intends to obtain has not, as I understand, been published, it seems on an ordinary reading of the legislation, given that the words of the statute are plain and unequivocal, to be a novel approach if the Lord Chancellor is not permitted to propose a revision of the guideline.

Lord Justice Davis also claims that the inclusion of specific cohorts in the imposition guideline is not

“a policy decision of any significance”,

but that is not the case. Even someone as distinguished as Lord Justice Davis must understand that he cannot unilaterally determine, in opposition to the Lord Chancellor, a policy that the Government are obliged to follow. He also says in his letter, rather oddly:

“All judges and magistrates are required to apply any relevant guideline unless the interests of justice require otherwise. In practice, the guidelines form the backbone of every sentencing decision made throughout England and Wales. There is general acceptance of the guidelines by the judiciary because they emanate from an independent body on which”—


this is an important bit—

“judicial members are in the majority. The Council preserves the critical constitutional position of the independent judiciary in relation to sentencing”.

He goes on to say:

“In criminal proceedings where the offender is the subject of prosecution by the state, the state should not determine the sentence imposed on an individual offender. If sentencing guidelines of whatever kind were to be dictated in any way by Ministers of the Crown, this principle would be breached”.


I believe that Lord Justice Davis is mistaken for the following reasons. First, the critical constitutional position of the independent judiciary relates to the sentencing of individual offenders, not the overarching policy. Secondly, Lord Justice Davis implies that the judiciary accept, and presumably follow, sentencing guidelines only

“because they emanate from an independent body on which judicial members are in the majority”,

and I believe that is wrong. Thirdly, the letter from the Lord Chancellor that Lord Justice Davis was replying to does not state or even suggest that Ministers should play any role in the sentences imposed on individual offenders. To suggest otherwise, as Lord Justice Davis does, is disingenuous, I suggest. Fourthly, and lastly, the sense that courts are not part of the state is not only wrong by any ordinary understanding of what the state consists of but is explicitly contradicted by the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary’s own website, which states:

“The justice system is one of the three branches of the state. The other two branches are the executive, or the government, and the legislature, which is the two Houses of Parliament”.


Presumably, when Lord Justice Davis refers to the state, he means the Executive.

It is right that the Government have taken swift action to legislate, but the Minister should also explain and look to the workings of his department, given that in the 12 months to January 2025, senior officials from the Ministry of Justice attended meetings of the Sentencing Council when these proposals were put forward, and yet they did not alert Ministers to the fact that the proposed guidelines would be completely unacceptable to both Conservative and Labour Government Ministers.

It is right that we open up and more closely examine the workings and membership of the Sentencing Council and that it is subject to proper scrutiny; for instance, with confirmation hearings in Parliament. We must make sure that something like this does not happen again. Guidelines for the future should be required to be confirmed by orders in Parliament before coming into effect. Finally, it is right that parliamentary sovereignty has been exerted in this case, while judicial independence remains protected. The Bill is a vital and timely intervention, and for that reason I am pleased on this occasion to support it.

Courts: Backlogs

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

The noble and learned Lord makes a very fair point. It is regrettable that the numbers are so high and are increasing—that is the underlying problem with which we are grappling within the Ministry of Justice. It is interesting that in the family court system we are back down to the pre-Covid numbers; that is good, and we are trying to bear down on that further. Nevertheless, the noble and learned Lord makes a very good point and I am sure that Sir Brian Leveson will address these points.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware of considerable concerns articulated by the Magistrates’ Association, among others, on the single justice procedure and the impact on vulnerable people, such as those with dementia or cancer, who have been brought to court. As he knows, that system is a magistrate with a lay expert supporting him. Will those issues, which are long standing since the establishment of the single justice procedure in 2015, be part of the ongoing review, as articulated by his right honourable friend Heidi Alexander two months ago?

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

I have sat as a single justice on certain types of cases. I understand that there are concerns about the single justice procedure, but I am not sure of the answer to the noble Lord’s question about whether it is part of Sir Brian’s review. I will write to him on that question.

Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. Like him, I am pleased that David Gauke has agreed to chair this review panel. I have worked closely with him—he was one of my trustees at the Prison Reform Trust—so I know not just how capable he is but how enthusiastic he is for prison reform. We will shortly announce the rest of the panel and I am sure my noble friend will welcome them as enthusiastically.

I agree with my noble friend about community sentences for adults who would otherwise have short-term sentences. I have been in prisons for 22 years and I have seen too many people go in and come out no different. We need to use the opportunity when they are in prison to overcome their mental health and addiction problems. When they leave, they need somewhere to live and, hopefully, a job. It is much easier to do a lot of that—when the risks are right—when someone is in the community, not in prison.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I am old enough to remember the promise, under the last Labour Government, to build Titan prisons with 7,500 places—that never happened. Notwithstanding that, the Government are laudably pursuing a policy of tackling violence against women and girls. With that in mind, what specific policies are in place to protect the interests of victims of prisoners hitherto convicted of domestic abuse and sexual assault, who may be released?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble Lord will be pleased to know that a victims’ representative will be appointed to the panel. That is important because the voices of victims need to be heard and we will be announcing the appointment soon.

It is a very difficult situation for victims, especially with the recent releases. Often, they expected someone to be released but it happened a few days or weeks early. I believe that the victim contact scheme is important and works very well. We need to make sure that victims engage with it, where appropriate, because they do not in all cases. The latest SDS40 releases were far better managed. We had an eight-week lead-in time, which is not perfect but is better than the earlier ECSL scheme, which was pretty chaotic. It is important that this review considers the victims in every sentence and every line of the report.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 21st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

Would it be possible to say something about what I think is common ground in this group—namely, the amendments dealing with the composition and functions of the Parole Board? This is dealt with in government Amendment 153A and Amendments 154, 155 and 156, in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett.

I thank the Government for what they have done. I entirely associate myself with that, and thank the Minister and the Lord Chancellor, and anyone else from the Government who accepted all of this. I am very grateful.

However, I now want to be slightly churlish about the new chair of the Parole Board—a very important position. A new chair is to be appointed, and looking at the website I see that the deadline for the applications was 24 February, sifting was 31 March, and interviews are expected to end on 31 May. I assume that the competition is largely done but current. Maybe the Minister cannot answer this now, but the provisions in relation to the Parole Board have been significantly changed as a result of this amendment.

There are two things. I imagine there are a number of people who would never contemplate taking on a quasi-judicial position; they would not touch it with a bargepole on the basis that you could make a decision that the Secretary of State thought affected public confidence in the board. No one would become a judge if you could be removed on the whim of a government Minister; it seems equally clear that no self-respecting person could agree to be chairman of the Parole Board if they could be removed on the whim of a Minister, as was in the Bill when this competition was run.

More seriously, the role of the Parole Board chair was crafted to remove the chair from the core work of the board—that is to say, deciding cases. Everyone knows that if you sit as a judge it is critical that you are not an administrator—you cannot lead and you are not respected. It seems to me very clear that the position of the chairman of the Parole Board has to be looked at in the light of the amendments that we are about to make.

I find it somewhat disappointing that this competition has been rushed ahead with without the position of the chairman being clear. I very much hope that the Minister can give some reassurance that more time will be taken to consider this in the light of the changes to the Bill, and that the competition will not go ahead without a further opportunity for people to apply and a proper assessment made of whether the persons who are in line are competent to deal with sitting on cases.

I do not know how this has happened. I am sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the Minister, but it is very disturbing that an appointment should be made on the basis of something in the Bill which has now been radically changed. I feel very churlish to be raising this point in the light of the Government’s acceptance of these amendments, but it seems to me that, as the chairmanship of the Parole Board is so critical, as the Minister and all of us accept, we must get the right person to do it. I am not certain that it is possible to have the right person without taking into account the new qualifications. I apologise for being churlish and for asking this question, but it is rather important. Otherwise, I warmly welcome this and thank the Government for what they have done.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I concede that I am the amuse-bouche of this debate, rather than the main course, as alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. If your Lordships’ House will allow me a few minutes, I will develop my remarks on Amendment 156ZA, tabled in my name, on Parole Board hearings. I thank my noble friend Lady Lawlor for originally moving this amendment so ably in my absence—I was unavoidably detained on parliamentary business—in Committee on 25 March. Naturally, I read my noble friend Lord Howe’s response on that occasion with great care.

The amendment seeks to establish the presumption that Parole Board hearings will be open to the public, but with exceptions. It endeavours to improve public faith and trust in the criminal justice system. This is both a probing and a permissive amendment. It is a natural progression that consolidates the reforms undertaken by Ministers over the last six years.

As we know, this was prompted by public disquiet over the proposed release of serial rapist John Worboys in 2018, which resulted in a review of the parole system and a public consultation, which was published in 2022. There was a finding in the High Court that the Parole Board’s rule 25—a blanket ban on transparency and details of the board’s deliberations—was unlawful. The Government have rightly moved to address the very serious failings identified by the Worboys case by allowing summaries of Parole Board decisions to be provided to victims and other interested parties, and to allow a reconsideration mechanism introduced in 2019. This allows a prisoner and/or the Secretary of State for Justice within 21 days to seek reconsideration of several decisions taken by the board. Victims are now also permitted to seek a judicial review on the grounds that decisions are procedurally unfair or irrational. Most significantly, the Parole Board’s rule 15 was amended by secondary legislation in 2022 to enable public hearings to be facilitated, upon request to the chair of the Parole Board, “in the interests of justice”—a test utilised by the Mental Health Tribunal.

This amendment is nuanced and heavily caveated in proposed new subsections (5) and (7). It presumes no absolute right to open Parole Board hearings on the most serious cases, but it nevertheless presents a balance between the interests of the victim, prisoners and the wider criminal justice system. It imposes a statutory duty on Ministers to take note of the importance of rehabilitation, reducing recidivism, fairness and due process.

I accept that the Parole Board discharges a quasi-judicial function, but secret justice is not justice as most reasonable people would regard it. Open and transparent judicial proceedings are one of a few fundamental principles in the court system of England and Wales. Furthermore, other jurisdictions across the world, such as those in Canada and the United States, have a more open and transparent hearings regime, especially regarding the right of victims to attend and participate in such meetings.

I am not entirely convinced of the Minister’s comments in the previous Committee debate: that the changes made in the 2022 regulations definitively precluded all but a few hearings from being held in public. My amendment specifically addresses concerns about sensitive evidence, and the concerns of the victims. It permits such matters to be raised as a rationale for proceedings to be held in camera.

Finally, may I respectfully disabuse the Minister of the notion that every one of the 8,000 parole cases would be held in public? This is not the aim of the amendment, the permissive nature of which means that there is an expectation that the powers will be only lightly exercised in a minority of the cases by the Secretary of State, with checks and balances in place to protect the operational independence of the Parole Board, and a requirement to publish a review of the efficacy of the policy as it affects the interests of justice test, as well as public confidence in and support of the criminal justice system.

I look forward to hearing my noble and learned friend the Minister address these issues and explain why it is not possible to go further, in the commendable programme of reforms already undertaken, by allowing public hearings to become the default position. I thank him for engaging so positively on this important issue.

End of Custody Supervised Licence Scheme: Extension

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, it is a priority of this Government to improve employment opportunities for persons in prison. I would like to pay particular tribute to the Clink Charity, which has done excellent work over the years. The rate of prisoners in employment six months after their release has significantly increased under this Government, and various steps, which I think I have outlined on previous occasions, have been taken to improve the qualifications of prisoners leaving prison.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, is it not incumbent on this and future Governments to focus on prolific offenders, those who have committed more than 16 offences, and hyper-prolific offenders, who have committed more than 45? In so doing, we could cumulatively redirect funding for less serious prisoners to rehabilitation and reducing recidivism to make sure that that group has a better chance of making good when they leave prison.

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My noble friend makes a very serious point, which has considerable force. The Government are well aware of it and will take it forward.

Prisons: Foreign National Offenders

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to reduce the proportion of foreign national offenders incarcerated across the prison estate.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to raise this important and timely matter—one that has been debated at some length both here and in the other place over recent months. My aim in this debate is to seek clarity and an understanding of not merely the policy direction of His Majesty’s Government, which is commendably clear, but whether they have the determination, political will, focus and resources to achieve their publicly stated objectives. This will of necessity involve me asking a number of questions of the Minister, for which I beg your Lordships’ indulgence.

At the outset, I would make the point and concede that issues relating to foreign national offenders are clearly linked to bigger economic, social and geopolitical issues in respect of immigration and displaced persons, which affect almost every country in Europe and will be a big problem for whichever party is elected to government at the general election later this year.

The most recent figures indicate that we have a foreign national offenders population of 10,423 in our prison estate—approximately 12% of the total population of more than 87,000. That is an increase of 13.6% since 2019. Each FNO costs an average of approximately £40,000 per annum to keep incarcerated and, of course, takes up valuable prison places, which, as we know, are at capacity or near capacity—notwithstanding the Government’s ambition to deliver 10,000 additional prison places by the end of next year.

However, the Government are removing significantly fewer foreign national offenders than they did even five years ago. In 2023, only 3,936 removals took place, compared to 6,437 in 2016, 6,292 in 2017 and 5,518 in 2018. In 2012, we removed more than 15,000 foreign prisoners. The Government are to be congratulated on their initiatives to address this situation—such as the May 2023 prisoner transfer agreement with Albania, which accounted for 37% of removals last year—but it prompts a wider question as to why so many Albanian criminals, who are easily the biggest cohort of FNOs in the prison estate, were admitted to the United Kingdom in the first place, especially as they were never able to exercise their rights as members of the European Union. The National Crime Agency has warned that Albanians have driven organised crime in Greater London and other parts of the UK.

On the subject of Albanians, is my noble friend the Minister aware that the German Government are quite content to derogate parts of the European Convention on Human Rights to prevent multiple vexatious and spurious claims by Albanian criminals? Why have we not done the same and saved the British taxpayer millions of pounds? In addition, the Germans are seeking to legislate with tough proposals to deport gang members with proven criminal links, even if they have no criminal convictions. The German Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, has visited a number of countries, such as Morocco, Kenya, Colombia, Moldova and Uzbekistan, in order to secure potential deals to receive migrants. She stated that the package

“is necessary so that we can continue to meet our humanitarian responsibility to people we have to protect from war and terrorism”—

such as the 1.1 million refugees from Ukraine—and said:

“In order to protect the fundamental right to asylum, we have to clearly limit irregular migration”.


Why have our Government not considered similar measures, as a close neighbour and a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights?

Close to a third of FNOs are citizens of an EU country, most of whom exercised their rights under the free movement directives of 2004 and 2008 and committed offences for which they were given a custodial sentence, prior to the United Kingdom formally leaving the EU in 2020. May I press the Minister to tell the Committee how many of them have been removed using the public policy, public health and public security provisions of the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2016, which still obtain?

While much is made of bilateral prisoner transfer agreements with over 100 countries, the actual results are disappointing. Why, for instance, have we not deported any Jamaican prisoners, as I understand it, under the prisoner transfer agreement concluded nine years ago with that country, and with a sweetener of £25 million to build a new jail on the island? Why do we routinely not deport prisoners to the Republic of Ireland, our closest neighbour? Between them, the two countries represent an FNO cohort of over 1,000 prisoners. Why are Irish criminals treated as special cases?

Can the Minister confirm that any new prisoner transfer agreements will be centred on compulsory repatriation, rather than voluntary or those with the prisoners’ consent? The latter has resulted in not much more than a pitiful one prisoner a week being sent home to their own country to complete their sentence. More generally, will my noble friend update the Committee on progress in respect of existing prisoner arrangements, including the new one with the Philippines?

These are, broadly speaking, bipartisan issues. I trust that we are beyond the spectacle of Labour Members of Parliament, Peers and others who should have known better attaching their names to letters imploring the Government, as in December 2020, not to deport prolific and violent offenders, murderers, rapists and drug dealers to their own country.

I note the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Removal of Prisoners for Deportation) Order, debated last year in your Lordships’ House, which increased the early removal window in the early removals scheme from 12 to 18 months. It appears sensible and reasonable, but it has naturally prompted a number of important questions six months on. What are the costs of the policy against the benefits? What legal challenges have materialised and how many prisoners have been removed as a result of the new scope of the policy? Furthermore, what steps are being taken to advise and communicate with the victims of these crimes, who might reasonably expect criminals to be incarcerated for as long as possible, as per the decision of a court and due process?

I find it odd that we are quite content to incarcerate foreign criminals for a custodial sentence of less than 12 months and then, upon their release, allow them to claim asylum as if they are good citizens, rather than individuals who have grievously abused the hospitality of British taxpayers. How can this outdated policy, the 12 months’ cut-off for deportation, be allowed to continue without review? After all, between 2007 and 2017, 13,000 individuals were convicted of rape or sexual assault and were not sentenced to immediate custody—not 12 months, 12 weeks or 12 days. In the case of EEA citizens, the Home Office could remove them immediately on grounds of public safety. Why does it not? In the case of others, we have measures contained in the Immigration Act 2014 which can be exercised to remove foreign nationals who are “persistent offenders” or have committed offences which resulted in “serious harm”.

I raised the issue of asylum-seeker criminal convictions in the House on 8 February in the wake of the notorious Abdul Ezedi case and was told rather indignantly by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans that reports of religious conversions by the Church of England to assist bogus applicants were untrue and unsubstantiated. Imagine my surprise a few weeks later to learn that an announcement had been made in the General Synod that an urgent inquiry by the Church hierarchy had been commissioned to look at these same allegations. Perhaps my noble and learned friend the Minister will discuss this issue with his colleagues in the Home Office, as I understand that they have undertaken to thoroughly investigate these well-sourced claims.

There is a fundamental reason we are not deporting more foreign national offenders: it is as a result of chronic and endemic mismanagement in the criminal justice system. It is why we have, according to the CPS, nearly 12,000 such individuals living in the community who should have been removed—an increase of 192% in the past 12 years.

I also ask my noble and learned friend the Minister to look favourably on the amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill tabled by my right honourable friend Robert Jenrick in the other place, which would compel Ministers to report regularly on the nationality, visa status and asylum status of every offender convicted in England and Wales, and therefore allow the Home Office to amend its policies to respond to operational needs, as has happened in countries such as Denmark.

I will finish with some comments about the report published in June last year by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. As we know, it highlighted the endemic problem of poor data collection, information systems and management to the extent that the inspectorate could not ascertain key data on either the early removal scheme or the facilitated return scheme. The report’s most egregious example was:

“To facilitate the case sampling exercise, FNORC provided inspectors with a spreadsheet containing 558 lines of data. Following initial analysis of the information, inspectors removed 242 duplicate records”.


Half the data in this audited sample was incorrect. The report noted that:

“It is unacceptable that the department cannot produce clear and reliable data on the FNOs for whom it is responsible”.


Time is short, so I finish by saying to my noble and learned friend that I welcome the key recommendations in the report on data management, performance reporting, casework review and case ownership and management. I hope that he can update us on efforts to address these serious failings and the actions taken thus far by both his own department and the Home Office in response to the report published last year. The public expect their elected Government to fulfil the most basic function: to protect their citizens and subjects and safeguard their borders in so doing. At present, we are negligent in discharging those duties, and taxpayers rightly expect us to do all we can to face up to these problems and fix a broken and dysfunctional system.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Bellamy) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who participated in this debate, in particular my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough for raising this most important issue. I am not sure that I shall be able to answer in detail all the questions that I have rightly been asked in this debate, but my officials will go through the transcript and I will write to everybody to make sure that the questions are properly answered.

Briefly, by way of background, noble Lords will see from the House of Lords report that there is a dip in the numbers and that they have started to climb again since the Covid crisis. I am told that, in effect, the dip is accounted for by various difficulties encountered by the Home Office at the time. They include quite a number of legal challenges. One that went to the Supreme Court was on something then called Section 94B, which operated the principle of “deport first, appeal later”; it was lost and, as a result, 700 cases had to be redone. Then, in 2019, there were legal proceedings that, as noble Lords may remember, challenged a lot of charter flights. In the meantime, the modern slavery law came into effect, which increased the number of modern slavery claims being made by prisoners. So a combination of factors led to that decline even before we had Covid, but Covid then had a further adverse effect.

Since then, we have climbed up again, to nearly 4,000 last year—a 27% increase on the year before. I just say that by way of background. I do not accept the stricture that the Government have been in a position of chaos and incompetence; I think those were the words used. The Government have been doing their best with a very difficult situation.

Against that background, briefly, there are, roughly speaking, about 10,000 or so prisoners who are foreign national offenders. About one-third of those are on remand. We cannot do anything about that, so we are talking about 6,500 people or something of that kind. Of course, there are also foreign nationals in the community —that is the number in prison—but we are doing our level best to improve performance in that respect. As I said, we returned nearly 4,000 FNOs from prison last year.

The Lord Chancellor has talked about the new measures that we are introducing; they include the early removal scheme, with which noble Lords are familiar. Between January and March this year, almost 400 foreign national offenders were removed—a 61% increase over the same period last year. Part of this is also due to the increasing use of prisoner transfer agreements. I shall say a word about that because it has, rightly, cropped up in the debate.

The Albanian agreement came into effect, or was improved, in May 2023 in order to speed up prison transfers, with greater numbers of the most serious offenders to be sent back to Albania. That is continuing but, even in the case of Albanian prisoners, there are still procedural difficulties that cause delays in the process. For example, each transfer has to be approved by the Albanian courts, which must sanction the Albanian authorities’ power to hold the prisoners, as it were, when they arrive back in Albania. It is a lengthy process; indeed, quite apart from prisoner transfer agreements, one is wrestling with some difficult issues in physically deporting a foreign national offender. Often, there will be very late appeals and all kinds of claims raised. In many cases, there will be absolutely no documentation, so you do not even know what country they come from; you then cannot prove where to send them or prove to the receiving state that they are indeed nationals of that state. These kinds of difficulties arise, quite apart from the physical problems of having an aircraft, escorting people and all those kinds of difficulties.

One should not underestimate the operational problems here but the Government are determinedly working on them. A better process has been introduced for dealing with foreign national offenders. There is a new task force across the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, and we have recruited 400 additional case workers to prioritise these cases; they have been in place since last month and will streamline the end-to-end process. So the Government are tackling the problem in general terms.

With that broad background, I will see whether I can deal with at least some of the questions I was asked. I will write to noble Lords on the problem of derogations from the convention, which was one of the points raised on the ECHR.

I think the problem with Jamaica has been the difficulty of reaching a political agreement with the Jamaican Government—I think that that is the case, but I will confirm it in writing. The Albanian example is working quite well. We have agreements with many other countries, but they are not always effective, because prison conditions in other countries are not very satisfactory. Sometimes, the agreement is to enable British prisoners in the foreign prison to come back—a recent example was from the Philippines—rather than for us to send people there, so it is a complicated area.

I do not think I can comment on the specific case of Abdul Ezedi in a debate such as this.

We will work very hard to implement the recommendations of the chief inspector’s report. Points about that were well made. It is another aspect where there can be improvement, but, as I said, we are well up—I gave the figure of 61%—on the equivalent period last year in our success in deporting foreign nationals.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Incidentally, going back to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, I once visited the San Miguel prison in Santiago, Chile, with the fabulous penal reform campaign of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern. The month before, 81 inmates died in a fire. It was the grimmest prison I have ever been to, but talking about prisons we have known is by the by.

I will press the Minister on the issue of the chief inspector’s report. He know that one of the key issues raised was the routine and repetitive use of manually accessed spreadsheets. There was no IT system that was trustworthy, to the extent that virtually any management data could be easily accessed. Is that a key imperative for the department to work on, as it prepares its formal response to the chief inspector’s report?

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. Yes, that is extremely important. I will write with a further update on what can be done about it. It will be no secret to noble Lords that the problem of data across the criminal justice system and the prison system is ongoing, and we are working with various systems of various ages, including those of elderly status. A great deal needs to be improved.

I will press on, having one eye on the time. One of the various points raised by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, was about the deportation of people who came here as a child. As far as they are protected, those people have to rely on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights on family life, which is often a successful defence, because they will have no connections with the country to which they are being sent.

On other countries, the one with which we are the furthest forward at the moment, as far as I know, is Italy. The Lord Chancellor hopes to reach an agreement with Italy in the next few weeks. I do not think that I can go further than that, but there have been encouraging negotiations with Italy, and I hope that that and the Albanian situation will help significantly.

I understand that consultation with victims is conducted through victim liaison units. In the case of an FNO facing deportation, I am told that, where victims have signed up to the victim contact scheme, that consultation takes place.

I fully agree with the points made by my noble friend Lord Farmer about rehabilitation and the importance of social visits. As noble Lords know, he conducted two important reviews not long ago, and I believe the ministry has accepted all his recommendations. An important part of that work was the social aspect of prisoners. I am not aware of any reduction in emphasis being placed on that, but I will investigate and write accordingly. Almost all prisons in England and Wales now have facilities for secure video calls, or in-cell telephony. I do not know whether that is the case in Minsk or Sarajevo, but it is a considerable improvement on what used to be the case. It certainly does not exist in the United States or, I would have thought, San Miguel prison.

There are important efforts to encourage peer-to-peer support. Pilots are in progress at the moment with a particular focus on FNOs, although there are facilities for long-range contact. FNOs with no visitors can get free phone credits for overseas calls and free video calls, which is considerably better than nothing. As I said, all prisons across England and Wales offer secure video calls.

Noble Lords have raised some important issues. I hope we are grappling with them; their importance is in no way neglected. The overall situation is that the Government are making progress in this area. Noble Lords have made very good points which, if I have not already answered, I will answer in more detail in writing. I close by thanking noble Lords, particularly my noble friend Lord Jackson, for raising these important issues.