Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity
(1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will repeat a Statement made in the House of Commons by the Lord Chancellor yesterday. The Statement is as follows:
“With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a Statement on how the Government will address the crisis in our prisons, not just today but for years to come.
The House has heard me recount my inheritance as Lord Chancellor before. The crisis in our prisons was, I believe, the greatest disgrace of the last Conservative Government. They left our prisons on the point of collapse—a situation that would have forced us to close the prison doors, cancel all trials and force the police to halt arrests. Crime would have gone unpunished, victims would never have seen justice done and we would have witnessed the total breakdown of law and order. The previous Prime Minister knew he had to act. His Lord Chancellor begged him to do so, but instead he called an election.
As I announced to the House on 18 July, we had no choice but to bring forward the release point for some prisoners. Some of those serving standard determinate sentences have seen the custodial element reduced from 50% to 40%, spending the rest of their sentence on licence. They can be recalled to prison should probation staff judge that necessary to protect the public. As we saw over the summer of disorder, these releases could not come soon enough. After the August bank holiday, we were left with fewer than 100 spaces in our men’s prisons. The system was held together only by the heroic work and considerable good will of our prison and probation staff. We were, on many occasions, just one bad day from disaster.
Today, the second tranche of emergency releases takes place, creating desperately needed space in our prisons, but that is not the long-term solution. I will now set out the long-term plan for our prisons, which will ensure that never again is a Lord Chancellor placed in the invidious position that I was on taking office.
This must begin by building more prisons. For all their rhetoric, the last Conservative Government’s record on prison building was abject. They like to mention that, between 2010 and 2024, they built 13,000 places. What they are less keen to admit is that, in the same time, they closed 12,500. In 14 years, they added just 500 places to our prison capacity. In our first 100 days, this Government are already close to matching that. The previous Government promised to build 20,000 new places by the mid-2020s, but by the time they left office they had built only 6,000. They were simply too terrified of their own Back-Benchers, who supported prison building vociferously, as long as those prisons were not built anywhere near them.
This Government will build the prisons that the last Conservative Government promised but failed to deliver. In seeking a lasting solution to our prisons crisis, we must be honest in a way that my predecessors were not. We cannot build our way out of this problem. Every year, our prison population grows by around 4,500 prisoners. This is a question of simple mathematics. To build enough prisons to meet that demand we would have to build the equivalent of HMP Birmingham—which is in my constituency of Birmingham Ladywood—four and a half times over, every single year. To put that in context, in the past 10 years, the last Conservative Government built just three prisons. While we will speed up prison building and build as fast as we can, that pace is simply impossible. For that reason, if we are to address our prisons crisis, we must be smarter about who receives a prison sentence.
Let me be clear: there will always be a place for prison, and there will always be offenders who must be locked up, but we must expand the range of punishments we use outside prison and consider how we punish those offenders who have broken our rules but are not a danger to society. For that reason, today I am launching a review of sentencing. It will have one clear goal: to ensure that we are never again in a position where we have more prisoners than we have space in our prisons.
The review will follow three principles. First, sentences must punish offenders and protect the public. For dangerous offenders, prison will always remain the answer. Punishment and public protection will be the Government’s first priority. There are some offenders whom I will task the review with considering, such as prolific offenders, who account for just one in every 10 individuals, but nearly half of all sentences. Some of them are hyper-prolific offenders, committing hundreds of crimes. I will ask the reviewers to consider whether a longer sentence might punish them better and force them to engage with rehabilitation on the inside.
The second, related, principle of the review is that sentences must encourage offenders to turn their backs on crime—we need both sticks and carrots. I will be encouraging the reviewers to learn from others who have succeeded. In Texas, for instance, Republican legislators faced a problem similar to ours: a soaring prison population; sky-high reoffending rates; and prisons that had run out of space. Working across political divides, the Texans introduced a system of good behaviour credits, where well-behaved prisoners could earn time off their sentence by engaging in rehabilitation programmes. The results were remarkable. Crime fell by nearly a third, reaching the lowest levels in half a century. The prison population fell by over 20,000, and after two decades, the Texans had closed 16 prisons rather than building new ones.
The third principle of the review is that it must expand the punishment that offenders receive outside prison. There are already ways that we severely constrain offenders, limiting their freedom outside prison. Those under home detention curfews are, in practice, under a form of house arrest. With a tag on their ankle and a sensor in their home, they are placed under curfew, generally for 12 hours each day. Should they break that curfew, they can be picked up and, if needs be, locked up.
In some ways, punishment outside prison can be even more restrictive than prison. It is a sad fact that in many of our prisons today, a drinker can all too easily procure a drink. On a sobriety tag, however, with their sweat measured every 30 minutes and a 97% compliance rate, their teetotalism is almost as strict as mine. All of that is just using the technology that is immediately available to us, and used already in this country. I will be inviting the reviewers to consider the technology they have available to them now, and the next frontier of technology, used in other countries but not yet in ours. I believe that the modern world presents us with the opportunity to build a prison outside prison, where the eyes of the state follow a prisoner more closely than any prison officer can.
Moving punishment out of prison for those who can be safely managed there has huge benefits. Outside prison, offenders can engage in work that pays back the communities and individuals they have harmed. The evidence is abundantly clear that those who serve their sentences outside prison are far less likely to reoffend. That cuts crime, with fewer victims and safer streets, and reduces the huge cost to society of reoffending, most recently valued at over £22 billion a year.
This Government believe that crime must have consequences and criminals must be punished. We also believe in rehabilitation—that those who earn the right must be encouraged to turn their backs on crime. This Government believe in prison, but we must increase the use of punishment outside prison too. The sentencing review will be tasked with pursuing those goals.
I am pleased to say that the review will be led by a former Lord Chancellor, David Gauke, a highly regarded Minister who served in multiple roles across government. He has rightly gained the respect of both the judiciary and the legal sector, as well as many within this House. I will work with him to assemble a panel of reviewers who will draw together deep expertise and experience in the criminal justice system. The review will take a bipartisan and evidence-based look at an issue that has for far too long been a political football, booted around by both sides. David Gauke will report back with his recommendations in the spring, and I have placed a copy of the complete terms of reference of the review in the Library of the House.
It is right that the review is given time to do its work. As I have noted already, however, the capacity crisis in our prisons has not gone away. When we introduced emergency measures, we believed that they had bought us about a year. But, after the summer of disorder, the next crisis could be just nine months away. For that reason, I announced last week an extension of the sentencing powers of magistrates’ courts, which allows us to bear down on the remand population in our prisons. But we must go further.
While I will not countenance any further emergency releases of prisoners, there are operational measures that I will lay before the House in the months ahead. The first, which I have already referenced, is home detention curfew. This modern form of house arrest curtails freedom and helps offenders turn their lives around. Offenders are subject to electronically monitored curfews, which must be imposed for nine hours a day, are generally 12 hours long and can extend to 16 hours.
As the shadow Lord Chancellor noted in the House in February, the reoffending rate for the average prisoner, which was measured a few years ago, is close to 50%, but for offenders released on a home detention curfew it is 23%. This Government will soon extend the use of that measure, following in the footsteps of the previous Administration, who rightly expanded its use on a number of occasions. We will increase the maximum period that eligible offenders can spend under house arrest from six months to 12 months.
The second measure that we will introduce will address the soaring recall population, which has doubled from 6,000 to 12,000 in just six years. Risk-assessed recall review is a power of the Secretary of State to re-release, on licence, those who pose a low risk to the public, avoiding the long waits they often face for a Parole Board hearing. In the past, the measure was used often: it was used between 1,000 and 1,500 times each year between 2017 and 2019, but its use has fallen in recent years, reaching as low as 92 times in 2022.
Later this month, I intend to review the risk-assessed recall review process, so that lower-risk cases can be considered for re-release after they have been recalled to prison for two to three months, and where their further detention is no longer necessary to protect the public. I should note that this will change only the cases that can be considered for release, with the final decision still in the hands of experienced probation officers and managers.
The final area where I intend to make progress is in the case of foreign national offenders. I share the public’s view that, with 10,000 in our prisons, there are far too many foreign offenders in this country, costing £50,000 each a year to house at His Majesty’s pleasure. It happens to be my personal view that deportation is as good a punishment as imprisonment, if not better. We are currently on track to remove more foreign national offenders this year than at any time in recent years. But I will now be working with my colleagues across government to explore the ways that we can accelerate that further, including working with the Home Office to make the early removal scheme for foreign offenders more effective.
When I walked into the Ministry of Justice for the first time as Lord Chancellor just over three months ago, I encountered a prison system on the brink of collapse. It was the result of the inaction of the last Government, who thought they could dither and delay, and led us to the precipice of disaster. But their failure was longer in the making: they failed to build the prison places this country needs and they failed to address the challenge of an ever-rising prison population.
In July, this Government took action to avert immediate disaster, but the plan that I have set out today does more than that. It will ensure that this Government and our successors are never forced to rely on the emergency release of prisoners again—a measure over which I had no choice, one that I took despite my personal beliefs and one that must never happen again. I commend this Statement to the House”.
Lord Keen of Elie (Con)
I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement of the Justice Secretary. It is comforting to note that the Whitehall tradition of dusting down old policies for new Ministers is still with us. Of course, there are many matters addressed in the Statement with which I entirely agree. The proposal for a review is certainly to be welcomed, and there are many policy initiatives touched upon that deserve further consideration and ultimately, I hope, some form of introduction, but does the Minister agree with me that one major issue to be addressed at the outset is the practicality and cost of the measures being proposed?
Take a simple example: extending home detention and the use of tagging. The Minister mentioned tags and sensors, but that is a tiny part of that overall programme. When we have, let us say, thousands of offenders tagged, we require more than just the tag and sensor, however sophisticated it may be. Does the Minister agree with me that, for the programme to work, we require real-time monitoring, real-time reporting 24 hours a day and a real-time response—again, 24 hours a day? There is no point in noticing that someone has left home under curfew if we do not check on them for another week. That makes considerable demands on police resources, for example. What will be done to address that issue in the context of these reforms?
If, however, we are going to use some other service, such as the Probation Service, does the Minister anticipate a significant and, indeed, material increase in the provision of that service? I also ask him: is it proposed to use home detention and tagging as a potential alternative to remand, since it is at the end of remand that we find the greatest pressure upon the current prison system? Furthermore, if we are to have a much-extended home detention system, what steps will be taken to monitor and deal with the impact on families of having an offender in their midst for up to 16 hours a day? We know from the experience of the pandemic lockdown of the stress and mental difficulty that can be caused by that sort of situation. We will need more than just experts in the criminal justice system to address that sort of proposal, so I hope that the appointment of the review panel will go further than indicated in the Justice Secretary’s Statement.
We should also consider the victims of crime and the public perception of crime and punishment. If your home has been burgled half a dozen times in the previous year by the same individual, it is somewhat galling to see him walking down the street in front of your house wearing a tag. We have to be able to inform the public as to the effectiveness of the proposals that are being made. We are going to have to educate the public with regard to their effectiveness. There is the further issue of public confidence in the penal system. At present, it is conceivable that a person given a three-year sentence can be released on licence after three months. How does the Minister consider that the public perceive that when it occurs? A further area of education may be required, if I might be permitted to mention it: the education of the magistrates and judges to persuade them that community sentences can have a much more major part to play in our sentencing policy. Will that too be addressed in the context of the present review?
Then there is a question of how the Government will deal with the opposition. I am referring not to His Majesty’s loyal Opposition but to the Treasury—the place where all penal reform proposals go to die. Before we start out on this ambitious project, will the Minister be able to assure us that he has, in principle, the support of the Treasury for the considerable sums that will be required to implement these policy proposals?
There is an acknowledgement in the Statement that we need more prisons. Will the Minister disclose to us the programme for those new prisons? Will he also address the difficult issue of planning, where proposals for prisons seem to be notoriously subject to blocking and delay? Are there steps that the Minister will be able to advise us of to try to circumvent that problem?
We then come to the matter of foreign nationals, who make up about 12% of the present prison population. The Justice Secretary said in the Statement that it was
“my personal view that deportation is as good a punishment as imprisonment, if not better ”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/10/24; col. 200.]
Does the Minister agree with me that this is a completely mad proposition? Foreign criminals, gangsters and drug dealers from safe countries—remember that we can deport foreign nationals only to safe countries—will come here to rob, burgle and create mayhem. Then when caught, according to the Justice Secretary’s policy, they will simply be sent home again, no doubt at our expense. We will become a magnet for foreign criminals. Why would you not come here if that was the policy being implemented? Get caught and go home but get a free ticket to go home—wonderful. Can the Minister advise me who dreamed up this particular policy and how they intend to implement it?
It is clear that penal reform has been overdue in this country for many years. I welcome the idea of the review and the appointment of the former Conservative Justice Secretary to head that review. I hope we can see such a review being carried forward in the very near future. I thank the Minister again for repeating the Statement.
Lord Dholakia (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement in your Lordships’ House. Overcrowding in our prisons has been in the headlines for as long as I can remember. Different Ministers have offered various solutions to this problem. No one seems to have looked at overall solutions that could resolve the problem. We are now offered a review by a former Minister and a prison capacity package to solve the present crisis.
We have long called for a review of criminal sentencing. We have asked for reoffending to be cut by taking a holistic approach to rehabilitation and community supervision, including a full range of rehabilitative services. We also believe in implementing a presumption against short sentences of 12 months or fewer to facilitate rehabilitation in the community.
The present proposals offer short-term solutions but do not alleviate the problems or provide the long-term solutions we badly need. The previous Administration had a golden opportunity to set up a royal commission on the criminal justice system, but this was kicked into the long grass. Instead, we have a piecemeal approach to legislation in this field. We need to look at the overuse of imprisonment. This has put us on top in Europe as the worst country in the way we sentence offenders. It is astonishing that we imprison nearly twice as many people as Germany.
There are a number of questions for the Minister. I welcome the proposals to reduce the prison population. We should seriously examine the work of the Sentencing Council. Surely a Minister should put a legislative obligation to take note of the prison population before a sentence is passed. How will the review plan to address concerns about disproportionate sentencing of minority groups and marginalised communities? Would the Minister agree that ploughing more resources into expanding the prison system to hold an ever-growing number of prisoners is far from the most sensible way to tackle crime?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
I thank the noble and learned Lord and the noble Lord for their welcome of the review, their excellent questions and suggestions and enthusiasm for what we are trying to do. I will try to answer some of those questions now.
Increasing the use of technology as part of community sentencing is something we should consider very seriously. It is not just about the conventional electronic monitoring and the tag. Other countries have far more advanced technology than we do, including Spain, which is a country I am going to look at shortly to understand what we can learn from them. A lot of it is about the data it collects and the reassurance to victims from that data and how it can support them.
The noble and learned Lord is correct that the more tags we put on people, the more work that creates for others. I have mentioned in the House before that we are recruiting 1,000 probation officers and 4,000 more police officers. But it is not just about recruiting them; it is about training them and settling them into their jobs, which takes time. We need to make sure that we do not rush at it, but one thing I can guarantee is that we are not short of tags.
On the point about remand offenders being tagged in the community, for me this comes back to trust and how much the courts can trust tagging and how effective it is at reducing reoffending. When it comes to offenders being at home for a lot of time during the day, if I had the choice between being in prison or being on a tag at home, I would much prefer to be at home reading my kids bedtime stories and helping them with their homework to being behind a cell door.
I am concerned about highly prolific low-level offenders and what we do with them—the noble and learned Lord raised this. A few weeks ago, I spent two days in Preston Prison, following an officer, Steve, around as he did his job. One thing that was very clear was that a lot of the prisoners he spoke to he had known for the last 32 years that he had worked in that prison. They were coming in and out from when they were young to when they were old men. So, as part of the review, we need to consider whether custody for longer periods is the right thing for them. Public sentiment about crime and what we are doing depends on how good we are at reducing reoffending. When 80% of offending is reoffending, something is clearly going wrong. We need to deal with that, but we need to do so as part of the sentencing review and the other things I intend to do in my role.
On money, we are engaging with the Treasury on the spending commitments needed to progress our delivery plans. But, like noble Lords, we will wait for the Budget, which is not too far away. For me, the priority is protecting the public; that has to come before anything else.
On new prisons being built, one is being finished off in York: HMP Millsike, which will open in the spring. We will publish a 10-year capacity strategy soon. I do not have any further details on the planning proposals yet, but I know we have the willingness to make sure that we can build prisons where we need to.
Finally, I feel that £50,000 a year for every foreign national offender in prison is quite expensive when we could be sending some of them home. But what is important is that we work with our Home Office colleagues to make sure that we process the paperwork as fast as possible.
Lord Cryer (Lab)
My Lords, we now have 20 minutes of Back-Bench questions. To paraphrase what my noble friend said, can we have questions, not statements, so we can get as many noble Lords in as possible?
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
My Lords, I completely support the general thrust of the Statement and the principles underlying it. Of course we will have problems with the Treasury—every department does on every occasion—but I completely welcome it, in particular the appointment of David Gauke. That is a very good start to the bipartisan approach, which I have no doubt will be shared by the opposition spokesman, in his usual supportive role.
On a specific point, right now the evidence shows that over half of adults on short-term sentences will reoffend—that is a terrible number. Meanwhile, community orders have a much lesser extent of reoffending: I think the figure is 34%. Can the Minister assure me that why and how that might be replicated will be considered in the review?
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.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
My Lords, one of the most depressing points in the Minister’s Statement is that the prison population grows by around 4,500 prisoners a year. Do we really have to accept that it will continue to grow? The Statement says it is a matter of simple arithmetic, but have we lost sight of living in a predominantly law-abiding society, with crime cut down to the bare minimum?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
When I first walked into the Ministry of Justice and was told that the prison population goes up by 80 people a week, I thought that was manageable. But when you times that by 52, and then by five, you realise the scale of the problem. There are a number of examples of similar situations where people have done things differently. While we have a big problem on our hands, we need to make sure that it becomes a big opportunity to change things, because something is clearly not working.
I will give noble Lords the example of Texas, where they decided that a number of non-violent and first-time offenders would not go to prison but would serve community sentences instead—a number of other states have done similar things. I mentioned earlier that highly prolific low-level offenders actually went to prison for longer. Texas also introduced good-behaviour credits, an incentive scheme for people to behave in prison. Crime went down by 29% and 16 prisons have closed. So we should take hope from the fact that, if we use the evidence and take our time, we can learn from other examples. However, it will take time for the increase in prison numbers to slow down: these things, unfortunately, do not happen quickly enough.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
My Lords, I greatly welcome the Statement and the Government’s decision to tackle penal reform, which is long overdue. It is absolutely right to put far more emphasis on non-custodial sentencing. If I have any reservations, they are about embarking on another prison-building programme. The problem is that supply creates demand. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that the decision to expand the number of prisons should be reviewed in the context of improvements in non-custodial sentences and their effectiveness, and in the context of David Gauke’s review of sentencing? There is also a case for closing some prisons, even if new ones are to be built, because many are appalling buildings with inadequate accommodation and terrible facilities, and they should go. Perhaps the Minister could also address that question.
Lord Timpson (Lab)
When I walked into Preston Prison, there was a big board next to the governor’s office, with the names and dates of all the governors of the prison from when it first opened. The first governor started working there in 1798; I walked up the same steps that the first prisoners walked up in 1798. So, clearly, we have a problem with lots of old, dilapidated prisons, house blocks and other parts of the prison estate; unfortunately, we need to build new prisons.
It will take time for our reforms to reduce reoffending. It is one of my goals, and I managed to get it into my job title: Minister for Reducing Reoffending. The more we can reduce reoffending, the fewer prisons we will need. Maybe in 20 years’ time we will look to close the prisons built in 1798—but, for now, I am afraid, we need all the space we have got.
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on his role in introducing this package of measures and look forward to its speedy progress. When I was Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor, I am afraid I was quite unable to persuade my ministerial colleagues to allow me to proceed with anything that remotely resembled this. I hope that, with the changed climate, the Minister can persuade the public that this approach to sentencing will have no adverse effects on the overall level of crime in this country, as one can find other countries to demonstrate, and that this is an altogether more effective system if it actually reduces the rate of reoffending, which ought to be one of the prime purposes of putting a person in prison when they have committed a serious crime.
Will the review in general be so bold as to have a look at the sentencing guidelines with the judiciary, which have tended to produce ever-longer sentences in recent years in response to populist pressure? Would he also consider the number of minimum sentences that have been introduced over the last 20 or 30 years? There is a get-out clause for the judges, in the interests of justice, but it tends to produce high minimum sentences in every case. Should not the judiciary be trusted to look at the exact circumstances of the particular crime and offender, and have this inhibition on their discretion removed? Will the review be so bold as to look at the actual sentencing guidelines?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for the question. When he was having those conversations a number of years ago, I think he was also having some of them with me in meetings outside of his political meetings, as I was talking to him about recruiting offenders. As I mentioned before, there are a number of examples of where crime has come down: Texas, Louisiana and a number of other states in the US. The Dutch model is also something I have followed closely.
The noble Lord is right that reoffending needs to come down. I hope that I can instil the skills I learnt running the family business over the years in the culture, values and organisation of the Prison Service, to help it become better at delivering what we need to do on reform.
On the terms of reference on the sentencing review, I will not go into detail—they are in the Library—but I will give noble Lords a brief summary. Our ask to the panel is that we must punish offenders and always leave a space for dangerous offenders in our jails. We must
“encourage offenders to turn their backs on … crime”—
we want better citizens, not better criminals—and we must expand the range of punishment outside of prisons and focus on technology that curtails freedoms. I am sure that noble Lords will be pleased to know that one of the panel members may well, I suspect, be a Member of this House.
Lord Cryer (Lab)
My Lords, we will hear from the Liberal Democrat Benches, which we have not heard from as yet.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, perhaps the review could be so bold as to look at the legislation which deals with mandatory sentencing and minimum sentences. The support around the House for community sentences is very welcome, but I think the Minister will agree—and perhaps he will confirm this—that community sentences need providers of treatments for mental health, alcoholism and so on, and all the services which support offenders. Will the review extend to the support for those providers and the whole gamut of what makes up a good community sentence?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for the question. Yes, I hope the panel will engage with the whole sector, and there are so many experts who have so much experience. As far as the scope of the sentencing review goes, it will be reviewing the framework around longer custodial sentences, including the use of minimum sentences and the range of sentences and maximum penalties available for different offences and how we administer them. The panel will also review the specific needs of young offenders, older offenders, female offenders and prolific offenders. It has a lot of work to do, and we hope it will do it by the spring.
Lord Woodley (Lab)
My Lords, there are 1,800 prisoners serving IPP sentences, as the Minister knows. One has been in prison for 12 years for stealing a plant pot; another has been in for eight years for stealing a mobile phone. At the same time, there is no review. When we look at prison places, I look forward to the Minister’s efforts in reviewing this situation, which cannot go on any longer. Does the Minister agree with me that we do not need large warehouse prisons? As the Prison Officers’ Association says, we need something local—something that can be looked after socially in the local area—and that makes sure that reoffending does not take place.
Lord Timpson (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for the question. As for what kind of prisons we need, I think we need a good mix of prisons of all shapes and sizes and in all locations. On IPP sentence prisoners, I am sure the House knows me well enough to know how deeply troubled I am by the state of the lives of IPP sentence prisoners. It is not included in the sentencing review because I feel we are already making good progress, albeit early progress. The IPP action plan is solid and we need to push on fast with it.
I am looking at two things at the moment. One is that 30% of IPP sentence prisoners are in the wrong prison for helping them fulfil their needs to get out of prison. I am also heartened by a dashboard that we now have so we know where every IPP prisoner is and where they are up to with their sentence—it may not sound much, but it is a game-changer for how we can support people to work through their sentence. So I want to make rapid progress. I also reassure my noble friend that, when I was running the family business, I managed to work alongside 30 colleagues who were IPP prisoners and they were absolutely fantastic, and the second chance that they were given was paid back in buckets.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, with sentencing of female offenders, much is made of their vulnerability, their adverse childhood experiences and revictimisation as adults. Judges are increasingly mindful of their roles as primary carers. All this is humane and understandable. Is the sentencing review going to take a similar approach to men? While they must also take responsibility for breaking our laws, many are equally vulnerable and have had many adverse childhood experiences—I think 25% of the prison population has had the experience of being in care—but it is culturally normative to take a far more punitive approach to men.
Lord Timpson (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for the question. While the review will evaluate the sentencing framework and examine the experiences of all offenders, it will be guided by the evidence of what works to keep the public safe and to rehabilitate offenders. I am focused on the evidence of what works both here and abroad. Currently, judges and sentences already take into account the individual circumstances of each case to account for the culpability of the offender, male or female, and the harm they caused, or intended to cause and any aggravating or mitigating factors.
There are three facts that I am sue the noble Lord will know: female offenders make up only 4% of the prison population; over two-thirds of them are in prison for a non-violent offence; and 55% of women in prison have dependent children. What noble Lords may not know is that the average life expectancy for someone who is not in prison in this country is 82; if you are a man in prison, it is 56; if you are a woman in prison, it is 47. So, we clearly have a lot of work to do to support these very vulnerable and often ill people.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, since so many repeat prisoners have drink and drug addictions, are the Government looking at residential establishments outside prison with a probation order, where, if they do not obey at the residential place, they would then go to prison?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
The noble and learned Baroness is correct that drugs and alcohol is a massive problem for people in prison and leaving prison. With 49% of prisoners having drug misuse problems, it is not surprising that in prisons there is a demand for drugs. But when people are out, we need to do all we can to help them overcome their addiction problems because otherwise they are far more likely to be recalled and to offend again. So, I am fan of drug-free wings in prisons and of all the excellent support mechanisms already out there. Residential support centres for women are of far more interest for me in the future, and there are a couple of examples that are already starting to work very well.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to hear the Minister’s Statement and his emphasis that prison is about not just punishment or public safety but rehabilitation. When I did a lot of prison visiting 10 years ago, one of the biggest problems was that, although courses were laid on internally, prisoners were often unable to attend them simply because there were insufficient staff to conduct them from their cells to the courses concerned. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us how that will be addressed. More importantly, what incentivisation will there be for prisoners to take part properly in the rehabilitation programmes?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for his question. I have walked past far too many classrooms in prisons where there are rows of computers and desks but no one inside. When prisons are 99.9% full, all that the governor can do is get people clean clothes, three meals a day and a shower. Going to a classroom is the last thing on their list, which is a very sad state of affairs.
I am used to incentives. Some noble Lords may have been into the business I used to work in—one of the Timpson shops—and while they may have asked for one key, someone may have tried to sell them two. The reason they do that is not because they are trying to be helpful; it is because they have an incentive. What I know from incentives elsewhere in the prison world is that they can have a very positive impact on prisoners’ behaviour: to engage with their sentence plan, to go to education and to purposeful activity, not to take drugs and to play the game. We are working on this now and I hope to provide more information to the review in due course. It is very powerful; in the new year, I hope to go to Texas with the Lord Chancellor to see for ourselves exactly how we can implement it and just how powerful it can be. That is very important for us to do.