Sentencing Bill

Lord Woodley Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Can the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, get up?

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

My apologies—I was waiting for a colleague to jump in. Late though it may be, it is very difficult to follow that outstanding contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Foster. It was exhilarating for me to listen to it.

My Amendment 134 is on probation capacity. It is crucial, bearing in mind that I raise this as a consequence of issues raised with me by the probation union Napo. The amendment seeks to give the Probation Service watchdog some teeth. Currently, only the people running local probation units can trigger special measures and what is called the prioritisation framework. This has given rise to accusations that they are marking their own homework. My amendment seeks to share that power with the Chief Inspector of Probation.

Prioritisation is an important safety valve to stop probation units from being swamped, but sometimes an outside perspective is needed to gauge this accurately and honestly, for obvious reasons. It is widely accepted that the Probation Service is under extreme pressure—there is no doubt at all about that—and this Bill will only add to those pressures. Officers are trained to assess risk, but they must be given the space and time to do that properly if we want to avoid reinforcing the risk-averse culture that the noble Lord, Lord Foster, mentioned. It is causing so much damage to the service—damage that we can do without.

I am sure that the Committee will join with me in paying tribute to the probation officer who, shamefully, was stabbed in Oxford last week while supervising an offender. I commend his bravery and fortitude. Thankfully, he was not critically injured. We wish him a complete and fully supported recovery. Beyond the immediate harm that was caused, this incident—the second such attack recently, as an officer was stabbed in Preston in August—underscores the increasing risk faced by probation officers and the crisis of prison violence spilling over into probation. Not surprisingly, staff morale and retention have collapsed, made worse by over a decade of real-terms pay cuts while case loads have soared to unimaginable levels, and worse is yet to come.

This amendment also seeks approval from the Chief Inspector of Probation before any extra pressure is placed on the Probation Service from within the Bill. This simple safeguard should address fears that the service may be unfit for purpose or otherwise, if it is unprepared for the extra work coming its way.

I place on record Napo support for the other amendments in this group, on capacity, which all seek to place in the Bill perfectly reasonable safeguards such as maximum case loads for probation officers and annual reports on probation resourcing and tagging operations. I sincerely hope that the Minister can appreciate the merits in these suggestions and those in my Amendment 134, which have come directly from staff on the front line. I look forward very much to his response.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 134, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on his very passionate speech.

This issue has come up several times, but it does need more emphasis. It is incredibly important. Although I very much support the intentions of the Sentencing Bill, we cannot avoid at least acknowledging the strain already placed on the Probation Service. If we are going to put new demands on the service, we must first be confident that it can meet them. The latest report from the National Audit Office makes it painfully clear that the service is struggling with staff shortages, rising workloads and unsatisfactory outcomes. Only 79% of target staffing levels for qualified probation officers have been met, leaving around 1,500 vacancies across England and Wales. Of the 12 regions, 10 are operating beyond full capacity, and almost half of local delivery units are now rated red or amber for performance.

In that context, asking His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation to confirm adequate capacity before we put pressure on it is a necessary safeguard. If we want the measures in the Bill to succeed, our Probation Service must be set up to succeed. This proposed new clause would ensure that—I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for his kind words about it; I am a complete passenger on this—and that is why I am pleased to second it.

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Moved by

[Lord Woodley]

89: After Clause 19, insert the following Clause—
“Re-sentencing those serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection(1) The Lord Chancellor must make arrangements to ensure that every individual serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (“IPP sentence”), whether in prison or the community, has been re-sentenced within 24 months of the day on which this Act is passed.(2) The Lord Chancellor must establish a committee to provide advice regarding the discharge of the Lord Chancellor’s duty under subsection (1).(3) The committee established by virtue of subsection (2) must include a judge or retired judge—(a) under the age of 75,(b) authorised, or authorised immediately before retirement, to try cases of murder, and(c) nominated by the Lady or Lord Chief Justice.(4) Within six months of being appointed, the committee must lay a report before Parliament on the process of re-sentencing individuals serving an IPP sentence.(5) After a report has been published under subsection (4), the Lord Chancellor may disband the committee established under subsection (2) whenever the Lord Chancellor considers appropriate.(6) The Lord Chancellor must disband the committee once all those serving IPP sentences have been re-sentenced.(7) A person (“P”) serving an IPP sentence must be re-sentenced in relation to the offence or offences for which P was originally sentenced at a Crown Court designated by the Lord Chancellor for that purpose.(8) The re-sentencing court—(a) must not impose a sentence more severe than the notional determinate sentence upon the basis of which the tariff was specified as needing to be served before an application for release on licence might be made, and(b) may substitute for the IPP sentence a hospital order under section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983, with or without a restriction order under section 41, but only if—(i) the court is satisfied, on the evidence required by that Act, that appropriate in patient treatment is available for P, and(ii) in the case of a restriction order under section 41, the statutory criteria for making such an order are met.(9) The re-sentencing court may confirm the sentence of IPP only if—(a) the re-sentencing judge determines that, at the date of the original sentencing, ignoring the alternative of an IPP sentence, P might appropriately have received a sentence of life imprisonment, and(b) at the date of re-sentencing, there is a substantial risk of P committing a further serious offence resulting in substantial harm if released. (10) Cases falling within the scope of subsection (9) may only be re-sentenced by a judge authorised, or authorised immediately before retirement, to try cases of murder.(11) The re-sentencing court may recommend that P may be subject to an extended licence for a period of up to five years, incorporating such conditions as the re-sentencing court considers appropriate to minimise the risk of re-offending.(12) In relation to the exercise of the power in subsection (7)—(a) the power is to be treated as a power to re-sentence under section 402(1) of the Sentencing Code, and(b) the Sentencing Code applies for the purposes of this section (and, accordingly, it does not matter that a person serving an IPP sentence was convicted of an offence before 1 December 2020).(13) For the purposes of this section, “IPP sentence” means—(a) a sentence of imprisonment or detention in a young offender institution for public protection under section 225 (since repealed) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003,(b) a sentence of detention for public protection under section 226 (since repealed) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, or(c) a sentence of imprisonment or detention passed as a result of sections 219 or 221 of the Armed Forces Act 2006.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause would implement the recommendation of the Justice Committee’s 2022 Report that there should be a re-sentencing exercise in relation to all IPP sentenced individuals, and to establish a time-limited expert committee, including a member of the judiciary, to advise on the practical implementation of such an exercise. It would also allow the court to substitute a hospital order, with or without a restriction on release for an IPP sentence in appropriate circumstances.

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 89 on IPP resentencing, and in support of all the other amendments in this group.

I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to make the argument for resentencing to your Lordships again, although I am under no illusions that the Minister is ready to announce a U-turn from this Dispatch Box to wipe this shameful stain off our justice system once and for all—at least not yet. I have no wish either to flog a dead horse but, as I said at Second Reading, it is important for us to continue scrutinising the Government’s position on this industrial-scale miscarriage of justice.

Ministers have consistently refused to consider IPP resentencing, which the Justice Committee in the other place called for as the only solution to this terrible injustice. To put it bluntly, Ministers are still defending the indefensible. We must see this for what it is: inexcusable excuses while more people die—yes, die—and more people give up hope. This must stop; action, not warm words, will be the most important thing going forward.

In this debate, I particularly want to hear the Minister’s objections to the kind of IPP resentencing exercise described by my amendment, which has not been presented to your Lordships in this form before. Crucially, what is new is that the resentencing court can impose a secure hospital order if it thinks this is necessary for public protection, and impose any kind of extended supervision post release—again, for the same reason.

It is widely acknowledged that the IPP sentence itself has caused harm, to put it mildly. Too many unfortunate souls have suffered problems between 2005 and 2012. It is understandable that the Parole Board might have concerns about the poor mental health of some of the people whose cases they are considering, but it is simply wrong and a great injustice that this poor mental health, in many cases caused directly by this long-discredited and abolished sentence passed by this Parliament, is being used to condemn anyone to indefinite preventive detention, stuck in prison where their mental health is just going to get worse. As I said, there will be more suicides and more hopelessness.

Noble friends from across the House have previously described this as a gulag sentence, and they are, of course, correct. The Minister has previously claimed that the Parole Board is best placed to decide whether an IPP prisoner should be released, but there is no evidence of this beyond the justification originally used to create this torture sentence in the first place. It is too slow and too laborious, in spite of recent helpful changes.

Natural justice dictates that it should be the courts, not the Parole Board, that are empowered to make this decision for this cohort. That distinction lies at the heart of this injustice and is the reason why IPP sentences were abolished over a decade ago. The Minister and his officials will of course say, “What about public protection?” The secure hospital backstop I am talking about—originally a suggestion by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, as an amendment to my Private Members’ Bill—is an elegant solution to this conundrum.

Under my amendment, if the resentencing court considers someone to be too mentally ill to be released, it can transfer them to a secure hospital where they can receive the therapeutic resources necessary for recovery. On release, all former IPP prisoners would have the supervision and support considered necessary by the court—another key safeguard to protect the public that should address the concerns previously expressed to us by the Minister. That is why I am proposing, in a nutshell, an IPP resentencing exercise with a secure hospital backstop and public protection right at its heart. I sincerely look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

My Lords, the real issue in this debate is: do we persist with the so-called action plan? I pay tribute to what the Minister has been able to do with a flawed idea, but we have to decide now how we deal with this justly and remedy the injustice. It is useful to reflect that there are people who have never been released. For example, one got a nine-month tariff and has served 20 years; another got a 330-day tariff and served 17 years; one got a six-month tariff and served 16 and a half years; and another got a tariff of three years and five months and served 20 years. Those are the realities, and you judge the seriousness of what they did by those tariffs. I shall come to the misunderstanding at the heart of the MoJ about the problem it is facing.

We also have the deaths. It is important to recall that this involves people committing suicide, and we should not walk away from that. There were nine in 2023, and four in 2024. The population was down, but it might be explained by the hope that had been engendered. My concern is that, if we do not act now, we will have—I use this word deliberately—blood on our hands. We cannot shirk the responsibility for rectifying an injustice, and what an injustice this is. Perhaps we should turn in due course to the “two strikes” injustice, but that is for another day; let us concentrate on IPPs.

We need a just solution. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, has put forward his amendment. I do not want to add to the time we will take on this by giving my views on resentencing, but that is one option. However, the Howard League put forward another proposal, which I have put into an amendment. Very simply, it is to give the Parole Board the power to direct, and to require it to direct, the release of all these people within two years. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, has put forward an amendment to that, suggesting giving the Government the power to apply to the Parole Board. But whether we take the resentencing exercise or this, this must be the last chance of doing anything. If we funk it now, we funk it for ever and we allow the so-called action plan to trundle along for years and years, not remedying an injustice.

Why do we have to do that? There are five points I wish to make. First, the sentence is accepted to be wrong in principle by absolutely everyone. How can we as a nation continue to punish people under a sentence that is wrong in principle and rests on the fallacy of thinking that we can predict human behaviour? There is no justification for continuing this sentence. It is simply unjust.

Secondly, and it pains me to have to say this, there is a complete misunderstanding of this sentence, partly because it was imposed so long ago, and people have moved on. When we are looking at the action plan, it is important to look at what was said in the 2024-25 IPP annual report. The sentence was described in these words:

“It was intended as a means of managing high risk prisoners, who were convicted of an offence where they would be liable to imprisonment for life, but the court did not consider the seriousness of the offence was such to justify the imposition of a sentence of imprisonment for life”.


That is a complete misunderstanding of the sentence. How can we have any confidence in a plan when people do not understand the sentence they are dealing with? I regard this as a very serious problem with this plan. I have had the privilege of being able to look at a number of cases of recall, and it is plain that those who are dealing with this do not understand the problem.

I recognise that when the error was pointed out, the department accepted the error, but it is important to see the harm that such a statement does. It puts the position of these prisoners on a false basis. They did not commit serious offences of the kind described. Many of them, as illustrated by the tariffs to which I have referred, committed offences that are not in the same league, by any imagination, as those committed by those sentenced to life imprisonment. Some of them were sentenced in respect of offences for which the sentence was no greater than five years—I note that the Government think that five years is the sentence for the kind of crime that does not deserve a jury trial. So please, will we try to understand what we are dealing with and recognise that we have done a great injustice?

Then one turns to another argument: that these people are dangerous. If we look objectively at the problems of many of them, they are not. But the test is high, and we have to accept that if we lock someone up for a very long time for an offence that is not that serious, we are likely to do them damage. That is the accepted psychiatric evidence, which those who will not accept that we must do something about this ignore, for a reason I cannot understand. But it is worse than that. Why are these people subjected to increased risk because they have been locked up under this unjust sentence? In all humility—and I do not seek to blame either political party for this—we made a mistake. In the case of the Post Office, we have done justice. In the case of blood transfusion, we have done justice. What is wrong with our system of justice, that we cannot do justice for those we have unjustly imprisoned? It is something to which we have to address our minds. I very much hope that we will have a cross-party solution. I am open to any suggestion, but the action plan is a failure. It will not deliver justice in time, and we must do something different.

There is a fourth important argument. Had any of these offenders who are locked up had the good fortune—and I say good fortune deliberately—to have been sentenced before this sentence came into effect, or to have been sentenced afterwards, they would not be subjected to this horrendous sentence from which they cannot escape. What conceivable justice is there in discriminating against a group of people and refusing to acknowledge our wrong in doing so?

Those arguments are to do with justice, and one would hope that justice is central to this Bill—we call this part of the criminal justice system. However, the Bill is meant, in a sense, to be a utilitarian Bill and one can praise it for that.

We are going to come later this evening to Amendment 122A—how many noble Lords will stay the course is another question—which deals with foreign offenders. We are intending to deport them so that we have prison places. We will not punish them; they can go free. What justice is there in a system that will seek to allow people who are foreign to escape punishment when we cannot look at the utilitarian advantage of releasing from prison some 2,500 people who have either never been released or are back on recall? The justice should be that we will deal with our own people first, free up the prison places, and if someone comes here to assassinate someone or shoplift, or deal in drugs, they should be punished, and we should use the prison places for them.

They are all powerful arguments; I have no vested interest in any solution, but I do have a vested interest in justice, and this Government are not doing justice.

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[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

Our expert probation staff who manage the risks in the community are experts in determining the risk that offenders pose, including IPP offenders. It is therefore their professional judgment and their decision whether they recall someone or not.

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to take this opportunity to apologise for my stumble at the beginning. My inexperience in the process here got in the way. Having listened to all the contributions, some of them were very emotional and some heart-rending, but I am quite certain that did not change the tremendous contribution that each and every noble Lord has made in here this afternoon.

I was heartfelt as I sat here, as I know that we have dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of IPP family members—maybe even some prisoners—watching this today, hoping for maybe more than the Minister has just said. I will come back to that in a moment. Nevertheless, listening to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and the noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Blunkett—indeed all the other Lords who contributed—I think that the experience was absolutely unbelievable.

It is a shame that, while the Minister has listened to them, he has come up with exactly the same answer that I predicted at the very beginning, which is more and more reasons why we cannot do the right thing. There is no doubt at all about that in my mind: there were more excuses for allowing people to suffer in prison and more reasons why we will, unfortunately, see more people take their lives, with no hope, because they are still in prison and serving sentences there.

The Minister said that his efforts were to make sure that we protect the public, and I wholeheartedly support that. That is why my amendment for resentencing clearly identifies public safeguards as being at the very forefront of all we want to do.

However, it is not too late. I intend to continue to work with all colleagues and comrades in this Chamber to try to convince the Minister to talk with David Lammy and others and do the right thing on behalf of this group. On behalf of those families, prisoners and all the contributors here this afternoon, I implore the Minister to go away and rethink, re-evaluate and reassess, and, I hope, to come back, as this goes along, with a completely different response to that he has given us again today.

Amendment 89 withdrawn.