Sentencing Bill

Julian Lewis Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I could not agree more with my right hon. Friend. The truth is this: most people in this country are already raging at the fact that prisoners get let out of prison early. They were sick of that happening under the last Government, and what are this Government doing in response? They are letting out more, and they are asking them to serve even shorter sentences. That is not justice. That is not what the people of this country want.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I was struck by the example that my right hon. Friend gave of someone who committed a vicious assault getting only 12 months, and now getting no months and no prison time at all. Of course, it could work the other way round: it could be that when a judge is forced to confront the fact that if he gives a sentence of only 12 months for a vicious attack the prisoner will walk free, he will feel that he must make the sentence somewhat longer—in which case the Government’s plan to free up a prison space will not even work, will it?

[Robert Jenrick]

My right hon. Friend may well be right. A number of the policies introduced by this Government have had the most extraordinary unintended consequences. The Secretary of State said earlier that a number of people have been recalled. That is because of the failure of the Government’s policy; it is because they let people out on early release when they should not have been let out. Who knows what the unintended consequences of these policies are? But let me ask one thing of every Member of this House: think what you would say to the victim of Daniel Tweed. Should that man be walking the streets of this country, or should he be in jail? I know what I would say. I know what we believe on this side of the House.

Ministers defend this policy by saying that short sentences are counterproductive, noting that 62% of offenders who served under 12 months reoffended within a year, but here’s a thing: 100% of criminals left on the streets have the opportunity to reoffend immediately. It is cold comfort to the victim of burglary that a man who ransacked her home gets a stern talking to, unpaid work or, worse, “prison outside prison”—that ludicrous and empty slogan put out by the Justice Secretary’s predecessor—rather than even a few months behind bars. Short sentences exist for a reason. Sometimes a short sharp shock is exactly what is needed to change behaviour, and sometimes a short sentence is the only thing standing between a dangerous individual and his or her next victim. The approach in this Bill is totally naive.

The Government celebrate their new earned-release progression model as the centrepiece of the Bill—a Texas-inspired scheme, we are told. Well, this could not be further from Texas if the Justice Secretary tried. Texas’s incarceration rate is triple that of England. Who exactly will benefit from the right hon. Gentleman’s new scheme? Burglars, rapists, paedophiles, and those convicted of domestic abuse-related offences such as battery, stalking, and coercive and controlling behaviour. Disgracefully, all such prisoners who supposedly behave themselves will be released after serving just a third of their sentence—yes, one third. They have to behave themselves, not be rehabilitated, as the Secretary of State suggested. They do not have to come out with some skill, course or restorative justice; they must just not be a thug while they are in jail. Is that all we are asking for now?

Only the so-called most dangerous offenders are excluded. Forgive me if I am not reassured. If a violent domestic abuser, who was given, say, nine years, can stroll out of prison in three years because he attended a few workshops and kept his nose clean on the inside, how exactly does that protect the public, how does that protect the victim and how is that justice? The Conservative Government had moved to toughen sentences for serious crimes, requiring many violent and sexual offenders to serve two thirds of their term before release precisely to stop such tragedies. Now the Justice Secretary seeks to reverse that vital progress and water it down again to half. Hard-working, law-abiding citizens are being told that their safety hinges on a criminal’s good behaviour after conviction, rather than the severity of the crime itself. Public safety should depend on what criminals did to their victims and whether they remain a threat to the public, not on whether they earn gold stars on a prison conduct chart.

To sugar-coat the largest reduction in sentences in the history of our country, the Government promise intensive supervision of offenders in the community. Even that assumes that our Probation Service, which the Secretary of State was right to say is stretched to breaking point, has the capacity to monitor the beeping lights on all these new tracking devices. At Justice questions, he himself said that the contract was not working, yet we are now going to place even more reliance on tags—tags for goodness’ sake—but is that justice? Who exactly will watch the offenders? We are told that probation officers are already swamped and that, struggling with huge caseloads and staff shortages, they are at 104% capacity. Now, every petty thief, burglar and drug dealer who would have spent a few months in prison will instead be out in the community with a mere tag between them and their potential victim. Is the Justice Secretary seriously suggesting that this will stop a violent offender abusing their partner? If he is, he should explain that to the House.

What of the expanded menu of community restrictions of which Ministers are so proud? The Bill gives courts the powers to ban offenders from certain activities and places—bars, pubs, sporting events—and the press release issued to the media gleefully talked about criminals being barred from football matches and pubs as a way to curtail their freedom. However, do any Labour MPs here truly believe that these bans will strike fear into the hearts of hardened offenders? Don’t be ridiculous! A career burglar or repeat shoplifter will not quiver at the thought of being forbidden from entering the Dog & Duck—ridiculous!

I turn to some of the less trumpeted parts of the Bill—the changes to parole and the oversight of the Sentencing Council. These are technical on the surface, but they reveal much about the Government’s priorities. First, on parole, in a little-noticed clause—clause 38—the Bill repeals the power that would have allowed the Secretary of State to require certain parole board cases to have particular members, such as ex-police officers, on the panel. That power was designed by the last Government to ensure that, for the most serious and high-stakes release decisions, there was a law enforcement perspective in the room, with someone who has seen the worst of what offenders can do. Now the Justice Secretary has just scrapped it entirely before it even came into force. So when a convicted murderer or rapist comes up for parole, they will no longer be guaranteed that there is a voice of law enforcement or a victims’ champion at the hearing. Removing that safeguard tilts the balance further in favour of the prisoner’s release.

Secondly, on the Sentencing Council, the Labour Government’s Sentencing Bill lifts its central idea from a Bill we previously put before the House, which they voted down but now support, having wasted Parliament’s time with an interim Act. Yet after all that, they water it down. They propose to force the Sentencing Council, which drafts judges’ guidelines, to get approval from the Lord Chancellor and the Lord or Lady Chief Justice for new guidelines and to submit an annual plan for ministerial sign-off. That is political oversight in principle—something Labour voted against when we proposed a stronger version—but in practice it is too little, too late. Only after I raised this issue on the Floor of the House did Ministers scramble to block those outrageous guidelines at the eleventh hour. Even the former Justice Secretary had to admit that such “differential treatment is unacceptable”. But remember, if Labour had listened to us sooner, this entire debacle would have been avoided.

The Sentencing Council is a creature of the last Labour Government—a quango deliberately insulated from democratic accountability. We warned that an unchecked council would go rogue and it did. Sure enough, it tried to rewrite sentencing by stealth and almost succeeded. Labour’s belated tweak, requiring ministerial sign-off on guidelines, adopts our position that the council needs democratic oversight, but it barely scratches the surface. The truth is that the council is a totally flawed structure. When Labour set it up in 2009, they made it answerable to nobody. As a result, an unelected body nearly smuggled in identity-based sentencing.

If the Justice Secretary really opposes identity-based sentencing, let us look at what is in the pipeline. Will he use this power on the forthcoming immigration guidelines, signed off by the previous Labour Lord Chancellor, which will deny Parliament’s clear will that immigration offenders should be locked up and subject to automatic deportation? Will he scrap those guidelines? They are in his in-tray. He is taking the power to do so. It is on him.

Despite this being a new role for the right hon. Gentleman, I am sorry to say that the Justice Secretary cannot feign ignorance on this approach. It was his 2017 review that fixated on statistical disparities in the justice system. His answer was not to enforce the law impartially; it was to impose outcomes by quota. His review’s guiding principle was “explain or reform”, effectively demanding that if an institution cannot explain a disparity in minority outcomes, it must change its practices until the numbers look equal. In theory, that sounds like holding the system to account. In reality, it invites social engineering and double standards.

The right hon. Gentleman openly champions equity over equality. In plainer terms, that means believing in bias by design—a justice system that explicitly favours some groups in order to tweak the statistics. We just saw the consequences of that thinking. The Sentencing Council’s two-tier guidelines were a textbook application of the Justice Secretary’s long-held belief: a two-tier system where justice is not blind, as it must be, but rather squints at your skin colour, your gender, your faith or your age before deciding how to punish you. On the Conservative Benches, we will always believe in the universal principle of equality before the law, not equity. That is the difference.

Turning to the matter of foreign criminals, for all the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks, as of 30 June this year there were 10,772 foreign nationals in our prisons—12% of the total. That is up on last year.

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[Andy Slaughter]

The right hon. Member is not easily confused. I will turn to exactly that point later, but in brief it is both, and there is a contradiction in it being both. There is going to be a massive expansion in prison places, and there are going to be more people in prison. However, at the same time, partly to reduce the need for even more prisons to be built and partly because there are alternatives to custody, there will be people leaving prison as well. It is a difficult trick to pull off, I appreciate, but I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is up to the task.

The Sentencing Bill shifts the focus from custodial sentences to dealing with offenders in the community. It is paramount, therefore, that probation services are adequately funded to manage the substantial increase in workload and that supporting resources, such as electronic monitoring, are available and reliable. There are several measures in the Bill that will increase the pressure on probation services. These include a statutory presumption to suspend custodial sentences of 12 months or less; an extension of the availability of suspended sentences to three years rather than two; and new community orders, including those that ban offenders from public events and drinking establishments, prohibit offenders from driving and impose restriction zones on them.

In the 2023-24 annual report and accounts for the Prison and Probation Service, the overall annual leaving rate for Probation Service staff was over 10%. His Majesty’s inspectorate of probation said:

“High workloads and a lack of support are critical factors in driving practitioners away from their roles”.

A report leaked to the BBC estimated that there is currently a shortfall of around 10,000 probation staff, which is four or five times the number being recruited. I welcome the extra £700 million pledged during the spending review period to assist the Probation Service in dealing with the increased pressures. It will be vital in filling the shortfall and increasing staff retention. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State acknowledged that in response to me during Justice questions today.

The success of the measures in the Bill relies heavily on the use of electronic monitoring, primarily through the use of tags. The Justice Committee has continually raised its concerns about the performance of Serco, the Government’s current tagging provider. In correspondence with the Committee dated 7 May this year, the Prisons Minister revealed to us the shocking fact that Serco had received financial penalties for poor performance every month since it took on the electronic monitoring contract a year earlier.

In oral evidence given to the Committee, Ministers have recognised that Serco’s performance has been unacceptable and that stronger punishments for Serco are possible, should it continue to fail. Those should include possible debarment and exclusion from bidding for public contracts. Indeed, some of us wondered how Serco was ever awarded that contract by the previous Government after the appalling fraud it committed during its previous tenure as contractor. Ministers have reassured us that Serco’s performance is beginning to improve. It is difficult to see how the Government can continue to have faith in Serco, but it is also evident that they cannot easily shift to another contractor as there appears to be no viable alternative.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Naturally, I had assumed that if people were not going to serve short sentences, in many cases they would be tagged. It is worrying to hear what the hon. Member is saying about Serco’s performance. Is he saying that effectively the people being tagged are not being properly monitored? In which case, does that not bring the viability of the whole system into question?

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[Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)]

The last Conservative Government crashed our criminal justice system, and ever since it is victims who have been paying the price. The shadow Justice Secretary spoke today of surrender, but who was it that surrendered victims to years-long waits for trials? They did. Who surrendered victims to reoffending rates through the roof? They did. Who surrendered victims to a failing tagging regime? They did. Who surrendered victims to their own early release scheme, with no specific exclusions for domestic abusers? They did. This is not justice; this is Conservative chaos.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Will the hon. Gentleman just remind the House with whom the Conservatives were in coalition for several years when they started their 14-year term?

[Josh Babarinde]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but should he look at the figures for 2015, he will see that all the things that I have described surged under the last Conservative Government. It is chaos and it cannot go on.

The Bill contains a number of measures that Lib Dems have proposed to help fix our pummelled prisons and crashed courts, but it also contains some problematic provisions that will need to be addressed if the Bill is properly to deliver justice for victims and survivors. The Liberal Democrats therefore cautiously support the Bill on Second Reading, but unless considerable changes are made throughout the remainder of the legislative process, the Government cannot expect our support any further.

Following a long campaign on one of the measures in the Bill, working with fellow victims and survivors of domestic abuse, I am heartened that the Government are honouring the commitment they made to them and to me to create a formal domestic abuse identifier in the criminal law for the first time. Convicted abusers will fly under the radar no longer. I thank the survivors who campaigned on this alongside us, including Elizabeth Hudson, as well as Women’s Aid, Refuge, Victim Support, ManKind and the 50,000 people who signed my petition in favour of greater identification of domestic abuse in the law.

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[Tony Vaughan (Folkestone and Hythe) (Lab)]

I am glad to support a Bill put forward by the only party serious about reforming our criminal justice system. I say that as a barrister with 19 years’ experience, and I draw the House’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Having been in full-time practice right up until last July’s elections, I saw at first hand the chaos in our prisons, the leaking and inadequate court buildings, and the overstretched probation officers, criminal barristers and others who were doing more for less in increasingly challenging circumstances.

This Bill is critical to delivering meaningful justice for victims, protecting them more effectively, punishing perpetrators and rehabilitating offenders so that they become better citizens, not better criminals. We often talk about the Government’s inheritance from the Conservatives, but I argue that the prison and probation system is the area of the public realm that is most affected by the Tories—where they did most damage. They had 14 years, and they created 500 prison places, as the Lord Chancellor said. The number of frontline prison officers fell by 31% and the Conservatives decimated the Probation Service. Their so-called transforming rehabilitation reforms, which privatised part of the Probation Service, resulted in taxpayers bailing out failing private companies with £467 million of public money. There is nothing more serious than ensuring law and order, and the Conservatives became the party of lawlessness and disorder.

It will take time to fix our prison and probation system, and this Bill begins that vital work. There is much I strongly support in this Bill. I particularly welcome the commitment to transition to an earned progression model for standard determinate sentences, inspired by reforms in Texas. There, as we heard, crime is at record lows, and it is important to stress that the behaviour of prisoners will impact their release. The principle on which this reform is based—that offender risk is relevant to how long they will stay in prison—is sound. If they reoffend and breach the terms of release under this system, the system will come down on them like a ton of bricks.

The inescapable fact is that we send too many people to prison who then become better criminals. The point of prison is to face punishment as part of taking personal responsibility for their actions, but most people in prison can be rehabilitated. People must be accountable for their actions without us becoming cynical about human nature.

I also strongly support other measures in this Bill, such as the expansion of tagging to monitor offenders in the community, which, as the Lord Chancellor said, has been shown to cut crime. I also strongly support the streamlining of deportation for foreign national offenders, on which I have a recent constituency example. In June, three men from Folkestone and Dover were convicted of raping a child and committing related sexual offences. They were together sentenced to around 54 years’ imprisonment. It was an utterly horrendous case. They were foreign nationals. Under existing laws, they can only be deported after serving the minimum term of their custodial sentence, which is often between a third and a half of it. Why should the British taxpayer foot the bill for their incarceration here for the next seven, eight or nine years while our prisons are at capacity?

Clause 32 of the Bill answers that question by allowing the Home Office to remove the offender from prison at any time and subject them to deportation action, irrespective of how long they have spent in prison here. I support that common-sense measure, which is yet another example of a measure that could have been enacted by the Conservatives, yet was not.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Despite the party political edge to the hon. and learned Gentleman’s remarks, I want to ask him a serious question. Presumably there need to be safeguards to ensure that when people are deported before they have served their sentences, those sentences will be served in the country to which they are deported. Can the hon. Gentleman explain to the House what sort of guarantees there will be that these people will not get off scot-free after deportation? I am sure that there must be some such safeguards.

[Tony Vaughan]

I do not think anyone is suggesting that people are going to leave their sentences early from the UK and walk free in their country of origin. There is a range of existing rules relating to prisoner transfer agreements and so forth, which will apply in any event. This may be a matter that the right hon. Member will be able to raise in Committee, but I have no doubt whatsoever that this measure—which will still be subject to the safeguards that are already in existence, whether in the deportation process or the justice process—will ensure that justice is done, which is the whole point of the Bill.

There is much in the Bill that I welcome, but let me ask the Minister a few questions. How can we keep the strongest possible safeguards in place for victims during the transition to more community sentences, how can we ensure that our Probation Service is well resourced and able to support the expansion of such sentences, and what additional measures are Ministers considering to support more effective rehabilitation of prisoners who have addiction and mental health conditions?

The Bill is a serious and radical response to our prisons crisis and our reoffending crisis, which are costing our society more and more every day in every way, and I invite Members to vote for it today.

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[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

I want to speak today about how the Sentencing Bill will bring some common sense to sentencing and bring in an evidence-based approach to stopping reoffending and protecting victims of crime. That is the primary duty of government: to protect citizens from harm. I will particularly highlight changes that mean that victims and survivors will be at the heart of sentencing and that punishments will fit the crime, protect survivors and focus on true rehabilitation, not just warehousing.

One example is the move from the existing system of exclusion zones, which prevent domestic abuse or sexual assault offenders from entering specific areas where the victim might be, to restriction zones that will limit the offender’s movement to an agreed-upon area. For too long, the burden has been on the victim, with survivors moving house, switching jobs and changing bus routes to avoid the person who hurt them. Restriction zones mean it is the offender whose life is reshaped, not the victim’s. Technology will track compliance, breaches will mean prison and survivors will help design the zones alongside probation officers, so that their freedom, not the attacker’s, is the priority.

For years, magistrates and judges have been calling for more constructive and flexible sentencing options—more than fines that can be dodged or custody that does not fix the underlying criminal behaviour. The Bill introduces that, whether through driving bans, travel restrictions, football banning orders or sexual harm prevention orders. It moves past a one-size-fits-all approach and allows judges to deliver personalised punishment, hitting criminals where it hurts.

Short prison sentences do not cut crime and they do not stop reoffending. Hon. Members need not just take my word for it, or decades of evidence; maybe the Conservatives will accept the word of a former screw. My constituent James, who worked in the Prison Service for decades, said to me:

“Short sentences do nothing.”

He welcomes many of the measures in the Bill:

“In short, the Bill is the law we’ve all been advocating for, for a long time.”

All the money that we currently spend on short prison sentences is not spent on Best Start centres, hospitals, schools, healthcare and drug treatment, where the root causes of crime can actually be addressed.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I am trying to go along with the thrust of the hon. Lady’s argument, but I just wonder whether it is as absolute as she suggests. Admittedly, people who undergo short sentences may be repeat offenders, and that is particularly true of shoplifters, for example, as we have heard. However, if a store is a victim of the same shoplifter over and over again, to be relieved of that shoplifter raiding the premises even for a period of eight or 10 months must be some sort of salvation, must it not?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I agree that retail premises need relief from that shoplifting, but I would like that relief to be permanent. I would like to see the causes of shoplifting stopped, and quite often that is drug use and organised criminal behaviour. I do not want just to chuck people in prison for a bit and then let them out to reoffend again.

We need sentences that give offenders proper access to drug and alcohol rehab and mental health care—the kind of support that tackles the root causes of crime. We need sentences that ensure the offender pays back their debt to society. Public safety is the bottom line here. Judges will have discretion to hand out prison sentences of less than 12 months, say, for domestic abusers or violent offenders. They will be able to make sure that survivors have the confidence to rebuild their lives knowing that the perpetrator is behind bars. Rapists and criminals who commit other serious sexual offences will spend their custodial term in prison.