Sentencing Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 6th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Hailsham’s second point illustrates his first point: if there is no purposeful activity available, how can one enforce the denial of an early release by virtue of a person’s failure to comply with a purposeful activity?

I want, briefly, to go back to the late and much lamented Lord Ramsbotham. In his book about prisons, which I know the Minister will have read many times, he said that the three things that will reduce repeat offending are that a prisoner, on release, should have a place to live, should be able to return to a loving relationship and should have a job. I took that very much on board when I wrote a paper nearly 20 years ago entitled Prisons with a Purpose. I wrote it when I was the shadow Prisons Minister, in the days when my noble friend Lord Cameron was the leader of the Opposition.

I visited about 75 prisons, young offender institutions and secure training units during that time. One of the things that struck me was that there were some wonderful examples of purposeful activity going on in a number of prisons but, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has pointed out, it very much depended on the leadership of the prison. If you had an inadequate governor, you had an inadequate regime within the prison, particularly within the education and training sections of that prison.

I have made a few visits to a number of detention centres and I remember being taken with great pride by the governor on duty to a workshop in a great big shed in a West Midlands category C prison. I will not name it, because things may well have changed by now. In the workshop were adult men aged between 21 and goodness knows what, and they were making hairnets. I have absolutely no doubt that there is a market somewhere for hairnets. But I equally had no doubt then, and have no doubt now, that the prisoners in those workshops, having been released, would never go to work in a hairnet factory. So, it was just time filling.

I went to another prison in Wales, where I saw male adult prisoners sorting blue plastic bits from green plastic bits and putting the blue ones in one tray and the green ones in the other tray. They were apparently parts of some electrical connection system. Again, these are the sorts of activities that would achieve nothing in so far as Lord Ramsbotham’s provisos were to be complied with.

I went to an open prison in the south of England where, far from the prison, prisoners and prison officers taking advantage of the farmland and market garden within their premises, now long closed of course, I found men playing cards behind the wheelbarrow sheds—and who else was in the card game but a couple of prison officers? Again, this is just time filling.

The problem is further exacerbated by prisoner churn. If you are sentenced in, say, Canterbury Crown Court and are sent to Canterbury prison that evening, within a few days or weeks you will be transferred to Maidstone prison to allow others to come in. Maidstone prison will be receiving prisoners from Maidstone Crown Court. The Canterbury prisoners who have been moved to Maidstone will be required to move to Lewes, then from Lewes to Southampton, and from Southampton to Winchester. So there is, metaphorically speaking, a jumbo jet of prisoners moving around the prison estate. How can they do any sensible activity? How can they go on any sensible course if, having barely started it, they are then moved to another prison?

I am happy to advertise on behalf of Timpson. I have seen a number of its workshops in operation in prisons up and down this country, and I have been served in shops by graduates of the Timpson in-house system in prisons. There, people are learning a real job that can translate from inside prison to the high street. They can go out and earn a living, pay their rent and taxes, and look after their dependants. That is the sort of work we need to see done, and more of it, in prisons.

That is why I wholly applaud Amendments 65 and 67, tabled by my noble friend Lord Hailsham: they hit the nail on the head. If we do not have real, genuinely purposeful, activity in prisons, the whole thing is a sham, and you will get repeat offenders coming in and out like a revolving door, and the prison population will simply grow and grow.

So, whether we vote on this or not, it is absolutely essential that the Government get a grip on the way in which training and education are dealt with in our prisons. I know of course that the Minister knows this personally—he has known this for 30 years—but lots of people in government do not, and lots of people at the Treasury do not, either. They do not seem to realise that by reinforcing failure—junk in, junk out—all you are doing is wasting the public’s taxes and not producing one ounce of public safety.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I thought I had better stand up quickly, while I could still take the pleasure of agreeing with everything that has been said so far on this group—if the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, will forgive me.

I have Amendment 98 in this group, which concerns remand, but I support every sentiment that I have heard so far about the other amendments. In particular, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate, because it is important that sentencers, like legislators and the public, are constantly reminded of the seriousness of incarceration and its justifications and purposes. They are: public protection, rehabilitation, deterrence and justice for victims—not political virtue signalling, which has too often been the purpose over the last 30 years, during an arms race involving people from all sides of our political discourse. In no small part, this has led to the current crisis in our criminal justice system, let alone in the prison system. So I certainly support that.

--- Later in debate ---

As far as I am concerned, my noble friend Lord Timpson is a breath of fresh air in politics around these issues and in the department. I have been so glad of his engagement on this and other issues. The Government say that they are not currently able to repeal this anachronistic and slightly barbaric provision in the Bail Act, but if he could at least indicate some ambition for a direction of travel whereby we could get some more data and end up with adequate provision for protecting vulnerable people—whether they are witnesses or defendants—I would be incredibly grateful to hear that in his reply.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, was so quick to assume that I was going to say something with which she would disagree. I hope, in fact, to disappoint her: she might be able to agree with what I am about to say. I added my name to the right reverend Prelate’s Amendment 52. I am not sure that I necessarily agree with every detail of her amendment; the reason I added my name, now and in Committee, is that I strongly believe that we need greater clarity about the purpose of prison.

Other noble Lords have given some very good arguments and reasons as to why the right reverend Prelate’s amendment deserves support. I am not going to repeat those. I am just going to make one comment of my own—and I will try to be very brief—which is that there has been a very big change over the past 50 years. There was a notion—it was certainly current when I was young—that the purpose of prison was based on a classical notion of justice; that is, that the perpetrator had incurred a debt to society, a debt which was to be discharged by a fixed period of imprisonment, after which that perpetrator was free to go. Nowadays, we do not hear about that form of justice. The rhetoric and the argument we hear—it appears across all parties; it is not an accusation against this Government or this Minister—are that the purpose of prison is the protection of the public.

Now, that is a hopeless case. It is hopeless, first, because its logic ends with every prisoner being subject to an indefinite sentence. We are back to the thinking about IPP prisoners, to whom we are going to come later this evening. If the protection of the public is what you are aiming at, that is the logic of where you are going. Secondly, it says nothing about the prisoner; it is entirely outward looking towards the public. It leaves the prisoner there in prison, but to what purpose as far as their activity, their purpose while they are there, is concerned? That is why some of the suggestions made in the amendment, and the suggestions made by other noble Lords in this debate about activities for prisoners and facilities, are so important.

Thirdly, it has been one of the contributing factors to longer and longer sentences, because if you are constantly under pressure to think about protecting the public, and you have a huge 25 year-old man in front of you who has done something very violent and you are going to have to think about protecting the public when you send him down, you are going to have to think about quite a long sentence. I think that adds to the longer sentences which are at the root of the problem that we are facing and which this Bill is to some extent intended to address. We will not complete this task in the course of this debate, obviously, but at some stage we need to have serious thought about trying to get back to some notion of justice and querying this idea that the purpose of prison, and the purpose of the criminal justice system, is the protection of the public, because of the dangers I think that involves. It has crept into our thinking without a proper debate as to its consequences, and I think it deserves some challenge.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the Minister has probably been in your Lordships’ House long enough to understand how rare it is that we are getting a degree of unanimity around the House on the amendments that we have debated so far. I am the first to admit that I am not particularly socially savvy when it comes to how people run the country, because I do not get the idea that we put people in prison for their own protection, when prison is a really dangerous place for vulnerable people to be. Also, as I have told the Minister before, I am extremely anxious about people being put in prison on remand for many months, because people on remand face the poorest access to healthcare and the highest rates of self-harm and are routinely held in the most overcrowded and unstable parts of the prison estate. Courts have no control over which prison they go to and for how long.

It seems that we are here trying to correct an injustice: that vulnerable women and children are put into a prison where they are clearly not safe is horrendous. I know that there is an inquiry about this, but the Minister is seeing and hearing from people who know where the problems lie, so I urge him to take this back to the Ministry of Justice—I am sure he will. I welcome the Government’s acknowledgment, through the Mental Health Act, that remanding people for their own protection on mental health grounds is wrong, but this power has to be removed completely. It really does not fit with a decent society, and I would be very happy to vote for quite a few of these amendments if they went forward.