Imprisonment for Public Protection (Re-sentencing) Bill [HL]

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Huge benefit can be obtained from using the places that are elsewhere. Those are the points that we ought to think about when looking at these amendments. If all else fails, we should have an expert committee—but we should not have a committee unless it is able to get somewhere, because, otherwise, it will raise false hope.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, for his continued campaign in this area. I also thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and my noble friend Lord Moylan for their remarks in support of the campaign and the general thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, discussed.

It is very tempting in Committee on a short Bill such as this to want to rehearse the Second Reading debate. Unlike the noble and learned Lord, who analysed the problems before us with a forensic stiletto, I tend to come from the blunderbuss school of argument. I would prefer to give this piece of injustice a thorough whacking, but, unfortunately, that would not be helpful; it would be repetitive and would probably not move the Government.

Because I am familiar with the Justice Ministers on the Front Bench, I know that they both find themselves in a position in which they would rather not be. They did not invent the IPP and are not responsible for its progress since 2003. I suspect that they heartily wish they were dealing with something else—but they are not, and they have to deal with this, so here we all are.

I will make one or two brief points. You could not put a cigarette paper between me and the noble and learned Lord in relation to the remarks he just made. The IPP sentence is uncontroversially unjust. It is also uncontroversial to say that, within the sentence as a whole, there are elements that aggravate that injustice. As the noble and learned Lord pointed out, the absurdities of the recall regime—the monstrous consequence of a slight breach in a recall or the terms of a licence—can lead to a recall in relation to something that has nothing whatever to do with the initial offence. In addition, there is the inability of the state properly to police the return of people to imprisonment without a separate and new trial in relation to wholly different allegations.

All those things ought to stick in our craws, and I think they probably do. However, we feel bound up in the bureaucracy and the sheer inability to move things along, because there are so many other moving parts in the world of public policy. One is never able to clear a path through to achieve what we all want to do: to end every consequence of the IPP regime, consequences which were to some extent ameliorated by the 2008 changes and by the abolition of the sentence in 2012. None the less, we are still here having these debates—wringing our hands and having anguished discussions—when we all know what we need to do.

I will do my best to return to the amendments and then I will stop talking. An expert committee is fine, but we have several hundred experts—they are called judges. It seems to me that by sitting either singly or in batches of two or three, they could form lots of expert committees to break the back of this problem.