Sentencing Bill

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

Second Reading

16:30

Moved by

[Lord Timpson]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)]

My Lords, it is my pleasure to bring this Bill for its Second Reading. I start by thanking the former Lord Chancellor, David Gauke, and his team for his independent sentencing review; this has informed many measures in the Bill. I thank another former Lord Chancellor, too, the now Home Secretary, for her work in getting us to this point. I also want to thank the many noble Lords who have engaged with me on the Bill. The input I have received has been of great value and generally very positive as we take this legislation forward. Of course, I want to pay tribute to our incredible prison and probation staff, who have worked, often unseen and under-appreciated, through an incredibly difficult time. I see and appreciate what they do every day, and I am proud to call every one of them a colleague.

I also want to pay tribute to Baroness Newlove, whose sad passing I learned of today. As both Victims’ Commissioner and Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, Baroness Newlove brought unparalleled experience and dedication to her roles. She championed the rights of victims and witnesses and held agencies to account. Her leadership shaped the victims’ code, strengthened victims’ voices in the criminal justice system, and ensured that the Victims and Prisoners Bill progressed with victims’ interests at its heart. She was an extraordinary public servant whom I was fortunate to know well and admired immensely, and whose life’s work and legacy are defined by courage, compassion and an unwavering commitment to justice.

Before I turn to specific measures in the Bill, it is important to understand the context of why it is needed. When the new Government came to power in July last year, we inherited a crisis in our prisons and probation service. We were days away from running out of places entirely; days away from the police having to prioritise which criminals to arrest, the courts having to make impossible decisions, and the criminal justice system buckling under insurmountable pressure; days away from our criminal justice system failing to deliver the one thing it was for—delivering justice.

We took urgent steps to prevent that catastrophe, and we have embarked on the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era, delivering 14,000 new places by 2031. However, if we do not take further action, it is only a matter of time before we will be back here again. In a few months, we will again be facing prisons on the brink, having to take emergency measures and, again, asking, “How did we get here?” That is why this Bill is vital. It does not kick the can further down the road, and it does not shy away from making tough decisions to keep the public safe. Instead, it will end the cycle of crisis once and for all. It will build a justice system that victims can have confidence in, and it will bring stability and sustainability to our prisons and our justice system. More than that, it will restore purpose to sentencing. It will deliver punishment that works by following the evidence of what works; that works for victims, delivering them the justice they deserve; that works for society—we want better citizens, not better criminals; and that works for the public, delivering safer streets and protection from crime.

Of course, that means that we must always be able to lock up the most dangerous offenders. Prisoners serving extended determinate sentences—those the court has deemed to be dangerous—will not be affected by anything in this Bill. They will still need the approval of the independent Parole Board if they are to be released at the two-thirds point of their custodial term. The IPP sentence is also not included in the new progression model. The Parole Board will continue to review IPP cases at least every two years, and in many cases more regularly. Noble Lords will know that this is an area of incredible importance to me. I am determined to support those in prison to progress towards a safe and sustainable release, but not in a way that undermines public protection. For completeness, nothing in this Bill affects those who receive life sentences, having been convicted of the most horrendous crimes.

But we need to be smarter: we need to follow the evidence. For many offenders sentenced to less than a year, prison sets up a revolving door of repeat offending. Over 60% of those with prison sentences of less than 12 months reoffend within a year. Offenders have limited time to engage in rehabilitation. Instead, they are exposed to hardened criminals and shown a path that can lead to more crime. When they get out, they may have lost their home, their job, their relationships and everything that anchors them to society. They are being asked to make a U-turn on a one-way street. But evidence shows that community orders and suspended sentences can be more effective at reducing reoffending.

Clause 1 of the Bill therefore introduces a presumption to suspend short sentences. We are not abolishing short sentences; judges will still have the power to impose them in particular circumstances. If there is significant risk of harm to an individual, such as a victim of domestic abuse, or if a prolific offender fails to comply with the requirements of a suspended sentence or reoffends, prison will still be available. We will break the cycle of reoffending. That means fewer victims, and more offenders getting their lives back on track. As many noble Lords know, I believe in second chances. Clause 2 widens the scope of suspended sentences, increasing the limit from two years to three.

Of course, for many offenders prison is the right answer, but if we want them to turn their lives around, we must make sure that serving time is not just what they do in between crimes. This Bill introduces a new progression model for standard determinate sentences. Inspired by the Texas reforms that helped to end its capacity crisis, we will ensure that prisoners who do not behave in prison can be kept in for longer; release at the earlier point will be theirs to lose. In Texas, following a settling-in period, crime fell by 30% and it has closed 16 prisons.

Clauses 20 and 21 amend the release points: those serving regular standard determinate sentences must serve at least one-third of their time; for more serious crimes given a standard determinate sentence, offenders must serve at least half. But those are minimums: prisoners who misbehave, are violent, or are caught with illicit mobile phones can stay inside for longer. We will also double the maximum additional days for a single incident from 42 to 84, so that the worst behaved will serve longer in custody. It is the same as in our communities: if you break our rules, you can pay the price with your liberty. Punishment does not end when a spell inside does, nor does release mean an end to rehabilitation. Offenders will therefore enter a period of intensive supervision by the Probation Service. They will still face consequences for their actions.

Clauses 24 and 25 introduce a strengthened licence period. Offenders will be subject to strict conditions tailored to risk and offence. These clauses mean that probation can set new restrictive licence conditions—for example, stopping them going to the pub, banning them from football matches, or preventing them driving. This mirrors the new community requirement set out in Clauses 13 to 15.

We will incentivise better behaviour from offenders. Clauses 36 and 37 allow community orders and the supervision period of suspended sentence orders to be terminated once an offender has completed their sentence plan, including all court-ordered requirements. The Probation Service will be able to incentivise compliance and encourage early engagement and completion of rehabilitative activities, but anyone who does not do this will serve their sentence in full and could face further penalties. We will also expand community payback.

Clause 3 will introduce income reduction orders, so offenders with high incomes are penalised more effectively when serving their suspended sentence in a community setting. We will make sure that crime does not pay. Alongside the changes in the Bill, we will address the root causes of crime by expanding the use of intensive supervision courts, to break the cycles that lead to ever more reoffending. These courts are inspired by their success in Texas, which has seen a 33% fall in arrests compared to those serving prison sentences. They target offenders, often highly prolific offenders, who suffer from addiction or poor mental health, and they impose tough requirements to tackle those drivers. Over three-quarters of offenders meet the conditions the courts set. And we will tag many more offenders, to ensure compliance and restrict their freedom outside prison.

What is more, all offenders released into the community will remain on licence for the duration of their sentence. This goes further than the approach the review recommended. Those at the highest risk will continue to be supervised by probation to the very end. All offenders will be expected to comply with their licence conditions and remain liable for recall to prison at any time. Any further offence, even something that would not normally attract a custodial sentence, will potentially lead to a recall. Offenders will know that any backsliding or regression could land them right back in a cell. They will obey our laws, and there will be punishments if they do not. That is why Clauses 26 to 30 will introduce a standard 56-day recall, replacing the existing 14-day and 28-day terms: these are real consequences for returning to crime and punishment that works.

More punishment in the community, more intensive supervision, more monitoring and restrictions: these will all put more pressure on our already stretched Probation Service. That is why the recent spending review announced up to £700 million extra for probation. That is a 45% uplift by the final year, the largest in history, because we are investing in what makes a difference; investing in what cuts crime and rehabilitates offenders; and investing to support the staff.

We are also making sure that our justice system operates on the principles of putting victims first, fairness and accountability. Clause 4 amends the statutory purposes of sentencing to reference protecting victims as part of public protection. The Bill will also go further than ever before to restrict offenders’ movements to protect victims. Victims of the most serious sexual or violent offenders should not have to worry about who they will run into when they go somewhere new. That is why Clause 24 allows probation to impose new restriction zones on the most serious offenders on licence. Clause 16 will allow courts to impose these new zones on offenders serving community or suspended sentence orders. They will be required to stay in a specific area, so that their victims can move freely elsewhere. The victim should have the freedom, not the perpetrator.

Clause 6 also introduces a new judicial finding of domestic abuse in sentencing. Probation will be able to identify abusers more easily, track patterns of behaviour, and put safeguards in place. This will improve risk management and further protect victims, and it is welcomed by victims’ groups.

These principles are also why we are progressing reforms to the Sentencing Council through the Bill. The council has undertaken valuable work and helped to bring greater consistency and transparency to the sentencing process. It also plays an important constitutional role, balancing interests across Parliament, government and the judiciary in sentencing policy and practice.

We are keen to support the council with its work. Following events in recent months, we are introducing a pair of measures that aim to maintain public confidence in its guidelines. Clause 18 introduces a requirement on the council to obtain the Lord Chancellor’s approval of its annual business plan before it can be published, and Clause 19 requires it to obtain approval from the Lord Chancellor and the Lady Chief Justice for all sentencing guidelines. My officials will be working closely with their counterparts at the council to agree underpinning detail on the practicalities of both approval processes.

I took this role to help reform a system that I have been passionate about for most of my life. My colleagues and I have looked across the world for what works; these learnings are contained in the Bill. Brought together, these measures will bring stability and sustainability to our justice system. In that regard, there is no alternative. However, they do more than that. The Bill will make sure that we have prisons that work; a probation service that reforms offenders; and fewer victims. It will put our justice system on a footing fit for the future, one that prioritises victims, fairness and accountability and one that prioritises punishment that works. I urge noble Lords to support the Bill and the principles behind it. I beg to move.

16:45

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I say at the outset how sorry I was to learn of the death of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. She will be much missed around the House. She was a powerful champion for victims.

I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the Bill, but I must say that it does not live up to the expectations one might have of a Sentencing Bill. It is not a plan for safer streets or a stronger justice system; it is, in essence, a plan to release offenders early because our prisons are full. The Government present this as a reform, but much is, in truth, a knee-jerk reaction to the challenge of managing prison capacity, and it is one that risks public safety.

The centrepiece of the Bill is the presumption that any sentence of 12 months or less will be suspended, so, in practice, short custodial sentences will all but disappear. Figures suggest that around 43,000 offenders will avoid prison altogether. Among them will be repeat burglars, serial shoplifters and sex offenders. This is not sentencing reform; it is surrender. How can any Government who claim to be tough on crime defend that?

The Government say this will apply only to “non-violent, non-sexual” offences, but as any practitioner knows, many assaults, domestic abuse cases and sexual offences fall at or below that 12-month threshold. Those offenders will now walk free. To allow this will be a profound failure of the state’s duty to protect its citizens—unless it has the unintended effect, of course, that courts increase nominal sentences to override the presumption. Will we in fact see an increase in the number of immediate sentences of 15 to 18 months? That would be an unintended and perhaps unfortunate consequence, but we know how human behaviour reacts.

The Bill also reduces the time to be served in custody. For most offenders, automatic release will come after just 33% of the sentence—five months of a 15-month term. The rest will be served in the community, supervised, in theory, by the hard-pressed Probation Service. It has been predicted there will in fact be an immediate 6% rise in crime. As Cicero said: to what good? That is not sentencing reform; it is a policy of early release with rising crime the consequence.

We are told that this is about rehabilitation. Are those who make up the 6% to be treated as rehabilitated? Worse, what new money is to be invested in probation, treatment or community infrastructure? There will simply be a prison system operating at 98% capacity, with Ministers desperate to empty it.

The Probation Service will bear the weight of these changes. As we know, it is already overstretched, under- staffed and struggling to manage risk. The Government’s own impact assessment concedes that an additional 580 officers will be required each year, at a cost of £30 million a year—funding that simply does not exist in the current settlement. As the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, on which I served, has demonstrated, reducing numbers in prison does not mean a saving: the running costs of prisons will remain the same. Will the Minister explain where in the ministry’s budget the money will come from? Will it be from defence legal aid fees or the budget for our crumbling courts? Can we have answers?

Clause 11 goes further still by removing from the courts key aspects of sentencing and transferring them to probation officers. They are not judges, are not judicially trained and already work beyond capacity. They will now bear responsibility for deciding how much rehabilitative activity an offender must complete. That is a big shift of responsibility. Sentencing—the determination of punishment—is, and should remain, a judicial function. It is a matter for judges applying the law in open court.

How can we have a Sentencing Bill that, in effect, removes an important plank of sentencing from the courts and the public eye? How will the public know that punishment is being imposed consistently and in proportion to the offence in question? What safeguards will prevent political or managerial pressure—I emphasise managerial pressure—from influencing those decisions? Policy will be made and put into effect behind closed doors. An important part of a sentence in a given case will not be given in public.

That is not reform; it is the start of the separation of powers being dismantled. It hands quasi-judicial authority to an exhausted service, doing so without additional resources, oversight or accountability. If the Minister believes that probation officers should exercise the functions of judges, he should say so openly to Parliament. To make such a change under the guise of efficiency is constitutionally wrong.

The Bill introduces a host of new community restrictions on offenders, including bans on entering pubs, sporting events or defined geographical areas. On paper that may sound straightforward, but how will it work? Who will be responsible for enforcement? Will it be the licensed trade, the police or venue owners themselves? Who will be told? In a big city pub, who is to know? The Bill gives no clarity, indicates no resourcing and gives no accountability framework; it simply assumes that someone, somehow, will make it happen. Probation officers, who are already overstretched and under- resourced, are expected to monitor compliance, enforce restrictions and manage breaches. The Bill provides no guidance on how that will operate. How will it work?

The Bill was not in the manifesto, which referred only to sentences that

“make sense either to victims or the wider public”.

The proposals in the Bill do neither. They will undermine public confidence in the justice system—confidence that is already eroded by early release schemes, court delays, and prison overcrowding and escapes. Every element of the Bill points in one direction: leniency driven by necessity. We suggest that that is not how to develop important policy. The prisons are indeed overcrowded, and previous Governments have failed to manage that successfully, but the public expect that those who break the law will be dealt with properly and punished, and that those who pose a threat will be detained. However, henceforth, an offender could serve one-third of a sentence, breach licence conditions, be recalled and still be re-released early.

Only yesterday, or the day before, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner sounded the alarm and wrote to the Lord Chancellor. Under Part 2 of the Bill, as the Domestic Abuse Commissioner pointed out, offenders recalled to custody will now be automatically re-released after just 56 days, with no review by the Parole Board. This will include convicted abusers after recall for contacting or stalking their victims, yet they will go back into the community with no fresh assessment of danger. This is complacency. It places victims at avoidable risk.

The Bill requires rigorous scrutiny. It blurs the line between rehabilitation and release. It hands judicial powers to the Probation Service and places public protection second to administrative convenience. We are not told how it will be funded. We are told it is modernisation. In truth, it is a risky experiment with public safety.

We on this side will carefully examine every clause in Committee. Our position is clear: sentencing exists to protect the public, to deter crime and to deliver justice to victims, and it is for judges. The Bill fails on all those counts.

16:55

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I had hoped that a more favourable reception might have been accorded to the Bill by the Conservative Front Bench, given the respect that many of us have for David Gauke and the work he did on the independent review, and the respect we have for the Minister, with his practical experience in this area. I entirely share the view that there are parts of the Bill that need careful scrutiny in Committee, but it is an attempt to deal with an appalling and farcical situation of releases by an overworked and understaffed Prison and Probation Service trying to deal with overcrowded prisons. The figures demonstrate that we reached the point where we had almost 100% usage of prison cells. There was no scope, therefore, for sensible use of them.

We are in an appalling situation, which has been driven by many years of trying to talk tough on sentencing. What that involved, and I am afraid it came from both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party at different times, was asserting that it was better to spend money badly on imprisoning the wrong people for longer than to spend the money effectively on rehabilitation, to which the Minister has rightly devoted much of his life.

There are good things in the Bill, including the identification of domestic abuse by the court, which, as the Minister pointed out, would be seen only by probation staff and others who have reason to be concerned where this arises. That is very welcome. The presumption against short custodial sentences is very welcome. The direct reference to the protection of victims in “purposes of sentencing” is a welcome inclusion, particularly in the light of the death of Baroness Newlove, who campaigned so vigorously for victims. It is particularly good that it appears in this Bill.

Robust community sentences, which the Bill facilitates by providing more means by which they can be made robust, are extremely important. Unless we achieve wide acceptance by the public of robust community sentences, led by some acceptance in the media that they may be the most sensible solution for some offenders, we will not change the upward drift of the prison population. This is extremely important and I am glad that it is in the Bill.

There are things that are less welcome. Having to release prisoners not as a result of careful judgment of individual cases but because of the need to reduce the numbers, as has been happening for several years now, is something we must get away from. I am pleased to see the earned progression model in the Bill for that very reason.

Let us look at some more controversial aspects of the Bill. This is the second Bill about the Sentencing Council in this Parliament. This is a ridiculous state of affairs. We now have a Sentencing Council that is required to submit a business plan, which the Lord Chancellor may or may not approve of. Who knows what happens if the Lord Chancellor does not approve of the business plan. Does it carry on doing it, or does it just stop work altogether, produce another one and wait until it gets approval for it? There is a veto for the Lord Chancellor —the Secretary of State for Justice—on the sentencing guidelines. Where is the trust? The Sentencing Council is a body of extremely experienced people that is used to dealing independently, and without bias and prejudice, with the issues that come before it. The Government do not trust it at all, creating a series of obstacles to it doing its job properly. I am very unhappy about that.

I am not against the income reduction orders in principle. They are seen as a punitive element in the sentence. However, they involve a fair bit of bureaucracy, to which the Law Society addressed some of its comments, and they could be a disincentive to work. I am sure the Minister would agree that the last thing you want is a disincentive to prisoners working when they are released. Work, having a job and carrying out that job, is well known to be one of the main factors in ensuring that people do not reoffend.

I am doubtful about photos of offenders as a provision in the legislation. All the guidance and all the rules under which that will become possible are the subject of delegated legislation and statutory instruments. We will not know, as we pass that part of the Bill, precisely how this photo opportunity or photo system will work. That has all yet to be settled.

Then there are the things that are missing from the Bill. We are still waiting for a real reform of IPP sentences, as are 2,500 people and their families. The Bill does nothing about that, as the Minister conceded in his opening remarks, except to allow the limited arrangements operating currently to continue.

One would have liked in the Bill the certainty that prison and probation services will have adequate resources to implement the release programme. We have not got it. I hope that the Minister can make further efforts to demonstrate to us that the capacity will be there. Making a success of the reforms in this legislation depends on the Prison and Probation Service being adequate in numbers, adequate in training and adequate in the amount of time it has for the numbers of people that it is dealing with. We need more assurance on that.

Despite the pessimistic picture that I have painted of the state of some of our prisons, which is truly appalling in many cases, there are good things going on. I reference the Oswin Project associated with HMP Northumberland, which involves a café in the prison, a farm shop associated with the prison and a café in Newcastle Cathedral, all involving offenders and much supported, maintained and made possible by volunteers. There is a lot of good work going on in prisons with a lot of people who want to see good things happen so that reoffending is reduced. Any further encouragement that the Government can give to that kind of work is desirable.

Prison is expensive and, if not properly managed and resourced, it sends people out into the community who are very likely to reoffend. When we contemplate what we do with our resources, we should not be deluded by the long-held practice of seeing prison as a free good, something the state must provide in whatever quantity that it decides. We should be looking at how we spend money in the criminal justice system and at what works and what does not work.

I commend Ministers for being prepared to look at what was going on in Texas. We looked at that in the Justice Committee in the House of Commons nearly 20 years ago when they started work on it. It was quite encouraging to hear right-wing Republicans saying, “We have to back this because we are wasting the taxpayer’s dollar”. That was in the days when the Republican Party did not believe in wasting money. Things have changed a bit under President Trump. It was a realistic demonstration of how, when you start to look at what you are using your money for, you must look at whether your measures make the public safer. I commend the Government for doing that and look forward, with my noble friends, to ensuring that the Bill, where it can be improved, is improved.

17:03

[Lord Burnett of Maldon (CB)]

My Lords, I start by declaring some interests. I was on the independent panel chaired by David Gauke which produced a preliminary short review in February, History and Trends in Sentencing. I shall return to that, if I may. It then produced a final report in May, many of the recommendations of which underpinned the proposals in the Bill.

I was also president of the Sentencing Council for six years while serving as Lord Chief Justice. The Bill has two clauses relating to the Sentencing Council. I broadly welcome the proposals relating to sentencing. One or two of them might be tidied up but it will come as no surprise to your Lordships that I regard the clauses relating to the Sentencing Council as misconceived.

As is well known, the impetus for this sentencing legislation flows from our prisons being full. There is no prospect of capacity being expanded sufficiently to cope with the demand in the coming years. Urgent steps must be taken, or the system will fall over.

There are a number of reasons why the prison population has doubled between 1993 and today to now over 87,000 people. At the heart of them has been sentence inflation. In 1993, the average custodial sentence for indictable offences was 16 months; by June 2024, it was 22 and a half months. There have been substantial increases in the minimum terms that those subject to life sentences must serve, driven by legislative change in 2003 by Schedule 21 to the Criminal Justice Act, which governed murder. That pulled up all sentences for violent offending, which in turn fed over into sentences more generally. The number of life sentences has substantially increased, as have sentences over 10 years, despite serious crime having fallen. The detail is in the history and trends report to which I referred.

Parliament has also repeatedly legislated to increase maximum sentences. This has all happened at a time when political and much public discourse has focused on the punitive element of sentencing while marginalising other important purposes of sentencing, which include reducing reoffending and rehabilitating offenders. With respect to my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, we have heard little of that this afternoon.

The impact of sentencing of different types is studied around the world, and thus rich data are available on the impact of different sentences on reducing crime. There is compelling evidence that non-custodial sentencing—of course, with a proper punitive element—reduces reoffending when short prison sentences do not, and that lengthening sentence does not reduce reoffending.

Countries across Europe—as well as Texas, of which we have heard already—have shown that reduced sentences and less use of immediate custody reduce not only prison populations but crime. So I particularly welcome the measures in the Bill to restrict further the use of short, immediate terms of imprisonment—subject, of course, to necessary exceptions—and those to enable sentences to be deferred for 12 rather than six months, and to increase to three years rather than two the period of imprisonment that may be suspended.

It is important that both community sentences and suspended sentences should be seen to include a proper element of punishment. The expansion of the list of requirements that may be imposed as a punishment is a positive step. Perhaps the Government would immediately also consider adding a foreign travel ban to that list. These are steps in the right direction to reduce the unnecessary and, frankly, counterproductive use of custody. They do not tackle sentence inflation, which I earnestly hope but doubt that our political class will have the courage to confront collectively before too long.

The Government have broadly adopted our recommendations for rationalising release dates and introducing incentives to earn release, as well as measures to contain the explosion in the recall population in prisons. They have gone further than we recommended with removing foreign national offenders. All three should reduce the prison population. There may be room for some debate about whether foreign national offenders should be deported immediately or at least serve part of their sentence to ensure that there is a punitive element.

While some may be concerned about allowing release on licence of fixed-term prisoners who have behaved well after serving a third of their sentences, those of your Lordships with a longer memory than mine will recall that the Criminal Justice Act 1967 provided for release after a third, and it was that way for very many years.

It is clear that the changes proposed in the Bill will work only if the Probation Service can undertake the additional work required of it. That will require increased numbers and funding—to that extent, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. But it also depends on technology, especially tagging technology. That must work, and it is necessary that any breaches are enforced. So, there will be much work to be done on delivery: work that the Minister is especially well equipped to oversee as the former chief executive of a substantial business. I wish him well in that task.

In the relatively short time left to me, I will make some observations on the clauses relating to the Sentencing Council, which echo those already made by the noble Lord, Lord Beith. Clause 19 requires the Sentencing Council to seek the consent of the Lord Chancellor and the Lady Chief Justice before publishing a guideline or publishing amendments to a guideline. If both do not consent, publication is blocked, the guideline will not come into force and amendments to an existing guideline will not take effect. This is no more and no less than a political veto in the hands of the Lord Chancellor. No Lord Chief Justice would want a power of veto, nor, frankly, ever exercise it. This power would enable the Lord Chancellor, and possibly a less benign Lord Chancellor than we have today, to stop some or all of the work of the Sentencing Council. That cannot be right.

Moreover, to fail to consent would be extraordinary given the careful construction of the scheme under which the Sentencing Council operates. Having undertaken deep research and wide consultation, it publishes a draft of its proposals. It calls for comments from anybody who wishes to provide them and consults further, widely. Both the Lord Chancellor and the Justice Committee of the House of Commons are statutory consultees. The Lord Chancellor has a representative who attends all meetings of the Sentencing Council to convey the governmental view. The membership of the council is carefully balanced by statute to reflect a broad range of interests. The DPP is there, and so too is a chief constable and a voice for the victims, for example.

I am puzzled that it is said that there needs to be a political override. There has never been one before in this area, and that is for very good reason. Before the Sentencing Council, there was a non-statutory body that worked as its precursor, and before that, the exclusive jurisdiction for setting guidelines for different offences rested with the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal. So, to the extent that the Sentencing Council and its predecessor, a non-statutory body, which were established at the instigation and with the full consent of the judiciary, impact upon anybody’s constitutional responsibilities, they are those of the judiciary, not the Executive.

I hope noble Lords might bear with me for another 30 seconds or so. I believe that the Bill would be better without Clause 19. If something has to stay, it would be better inverted, so that the Sentencing Council may publish unless both the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice object.

What can one say about Clause 18? Perhaps the Minister can explain what it is all about. It is silent on what happens if the Lord Chancellor does not approve the business plan. This looks to be a controlling mechanism, although how it would work is opaque. The Explanatory Notes are coy on the subject—that might be the best way of putting it—and the Minister only touched on it glancingly in his opening.

I finished on a slightly sour note, but I wish to emphasise that I do not want that to distract from the fact that I support the aspects of the Sentencing Bill that deal with sentencing rather than the Sentencing Council. I apologise for overrunning.

17:15

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, I declare an interest as Anglican bishop to His Majesty’s prisons in England and Wales. I, too, pay tribute to the late Baroness Newlove, not least in her role as Victims’ Commissioner. I want to echo so much of what the noble Lord, Lord Beith, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, have just said, which has lifted my spirits.

There is much to welcome in this Bill. For example, as has been said, we know in general that short custodial sentences do more harm than good, so I am delighted that we are now seeing some evidence-based policy-making rather than policy shaped by media headlines. We also need to clarify our long-term vision and aims. As a Christian, I believe that every human being is made in the image of God and is created to live in interdependent relationship, and broken relationship sits at the heart of all brokenness. Strong relationship sits at the heart of all that is good and transformative. I thank the Minister for his introduction, but I am dismayed that we are setting the context of this Bill as overcrowded prisons and a current crisis. Surely our long-term vision and big picture is not simply about more prisons or even decent prisons, but ultimately about strengthening communities so that people flourish in a network of healthy and safe relationships.

I am therefore hugely concerned by the piecemeal selection of David Gauke’s recommendations from his independent sentencing review and our failure to look at that big, long-term picture. For example, including victims in the statutory purpose of sentencing is welcome, but, if we want to respond well to victims and reduce the number of victims in the future, we need to pay attention to where relationship has been broken in people’s lives as well as in their offending. When sentencing, the place of trauma needs to be addressed for offender as well as victim. It is interesting that many people are both, and I wonder where that leaves us when we talk about putting victims first.

There needs to be scope to be attentive to the underlying reasons for people’s behaviour, not least in an endeavour to break the cycle of reoffending and fractured communities which is costly: physically, emotionally and financially. In wider society, there has increasingly been a push, as we have heard, for longer sentences and more punishment. The review found that

“punishment … has been given disproportionate weight and … there has been insufficient focus on reducing crime”,

and it stated that custody should be a “last resort”. The Bill does not address these criticisms. We are failing to ask what will enable a reduction in reoffending in the individual and bring transformation not only for them but for those who are impacted by their choices. We must include reduction of crime in the purpose statement, as recommended by David Gauke.

Creativity with community sentencing could be life-changing, but, sadly, even the proposed changes are set within such a punitive framework and tone. This is pandering to public opinion, not changing it. On that note, measures to name and shame people completing unpaid work as part of their community sentence need greater scrutiny. I am sure that the last thing the Government would intend is harmful consequences for thousands of children and young people whose parents are completing their sentence.

I applaud the skills and professionalism of our probation officers, and I am glad to see the rehabilitation activity requirement replaced by a probation requirement. But, to be effective, resource must continue to be increased, such that money currently wasted on inappropriate prison sentences is redirected to the recruitment, training and retention of dedicated probation staff and, indeed, prison staff. If prison sentences are going to be restorative, the recruitment, training, valuing and retention of prison and probation staff are vital.

All this is set against a backdrop of severe financial challenge. We need to spend financial resources differently, and that brings me back to the need for clarity about vision and aims, and what long-term good looks like. Although HMPPS has mission and purpose statements, I urge us to define in legislation the purpose of imprisonment. That would bring much-needed clarity to all parts of the criminal justice system and wider stakeholders, and would reduce confusion, if we are truly committed to reimagining and building an effective, well-functioning prison system.

I will seek amendments to the Bill to define in legislation the purpose of imprisonment. In recent days, we have seen yet again intense media and political attention on prisons, but we need to reduce the political heat and seek cross-party solutions. I am dismayed by much of what I heard from the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. We must shape public opinion rather than follow it. Is the Minister prepared to face down the media on matters of principle and evidence? Sadly, we saw the exact opposite of that earlier this year when we had before us the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill. There was bluster and knee-jerk reaction, and we saw the independence of the Sentencing Council put at risk, as we have heard more about today.

The Government refer to the position of the Sentencing Council as a “democratic deficit”, yet the independent sentencing review makes plain that politics has been a driver of the current misuse of prison. I am deeply disappointed that the Government have not addressed that charge and, notably, have ignored the recommendation to introduce an external advisory body to help Ministers to make sentencing policy, plan prison capacity and invest the money needed wisely. There is nothing in the Bill to give assurance that our planning and management of the overall prison population is going to be significantly better than it is now, or that we have grasped the significant changes needed, because we have failed to articulate the big aim and clarify what good would look like for victims, offenders, families and wider society in the long term.

If we had a well-functioning prison system with good headroom and capacity, low rates of violence and self-harm, and people coming out of prison less likely to offend than when they went in, this Bill might have been sufficient. Instead, it is a long way from the radical and bold thinking that is necessary to reset the appropriate use of prison.

Beyond the doors to the Chamber is a statue of Queen Victoria, positioned between the figures of Justice and Mercy—two key attributes, I believe, of God, who is in the business of reconciliation and transformation. If we allowed mercy and justice to truly dialogue, the Bill could be transformed. We need a joined-up public health approach to the criminal justice system that puts relationship front and centre. The Bill contains some good elements, but I urge the Government to listen more carefully to the Gauke sentencing review in the round, as well as to the many who call for the Minister to go further.

17:23

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the non-executive chairman of Leicester law centre, and I am privileged to serve on your Lordships’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee.

My first speech in your Lordships’ House was on sentencing. It was a pretty standard maiden speech, I am afraid, although the late Lord Longford was nice enough to say a few kind words. That was 27 years ago. Now, in November 2025, I am speaking on sentencing again.

I have to admit that although there have been many changes to sentencing policy, some good and some not so good, it is not until now that the approach that prevailed in 1998 has really changed. At long last, we now have a Bill that thoughtfully and sensibly tackles the fundamental problems of an almost broken system, one that can fairly be said to have failed. As examples, one fault is that there are just too many people in prison, women as well as men. Another is that they are there for far too long; and a third, even more depressing in some ways than the first two, is that rehabilitation is too often an aspiration rather than a reality. The results are all around us: our prisons are absolutely full, while too many ex-prisoners reoffend and find themselves straight back in jail.

The House will therefore probably not be surprised to hear that I warmly welcome the Bill, the principles behind it and the tone that it sets. I am also proud of the Government who have brought it forward. I want it to become a new chapter in our sentencing policy, one which is of our time and up to date and is not a victim of a long-standing and often phoney war between the political parties, as has already been said in the House today. How much time have we lost in the last 30 years by putting up the ante between Governments and Oppositions, as if to say, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the toughest of us all”?

The irony is that, until 30 years ago, there was not this battle to be the hard man. There were, of course, different opinions and debates, but basically, and at heart, there was an agreement and understanding that going for the lowest common denominator was not in anybody’s interests. The Bill seems to be a serious attempt to find an approach that can be supported by all people of good will and intelligence. Is that too much to ask? Of course, I accept that the Bill is not perfect. The implementation of its proposals will not come close to success unless it is given the backing, including the financial backing, that it needs. For that success to happen, the Probation Service is absolutely key, as many speakers from around the House have already said.

Probation has been to hell and back again over the last 15 years or so; experiments that Dr Frankenstein would have been proud of have been tried on it. In a way, it is a bit of a miracle that it is still with us—but it is, and its role is essential to the success or failure of the new sentencing policy as set out in the Bill. We are asking the Probation Service to play the leading role in changing people’s lives around, while satisfying the public that they are being protected. The service needs sustaining and strengthening, in numbers and in funding if more is to be maintained. My concern is that the money pledged until 2029, which is generous, will frankly not be enough if we are to make a success of the Bill and the excellent independent review that was its parent. Government must recognise this as early as possible.

Before finishing, I will mention one aspect of the Bill in a tiny bit more detail. I refer here to an amendment tabled in the other place by my honourable friend Linsey Farnsworth, the Member of Parliament for Amber Valley. She argued that as far as the earned model is concerned, there should be reward for positive behaviour by prisoners, as well as reward for behaving yourself in prison and obeying the rules and other criteria. As I understand it, the Texas model contains some reward for positive behaviour in prison, as well as merely neutral behaviour. The Minister’s reply in the other place was not discouraging, and I look forward—if an amendment is tabled on this matter—to the issue being debated and discussed here, and to what the Minister will say.

I end by emphasising once again my support for the Bill. The fact that it is here today, so soon, is a huge compliment to David Gauke and the independent inquiry that he completed so quickly, and of course to the Minister himself, who with his experience and commitment has been responsible for this legislation. I hope it is in order to say that the Minister has been a breath of fresh air in this area and has given us the chance to be proud, once again, of our sentencing system. Let us make sure that we pass this Bill and take that chance.

17:31

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that I will be forgiven if I concentrate more on what should be in the Bill than what is in it. For the purposes of today’s debate, I intend to focus primarily on sentences of imprisonment for public protection, or IPPs. Before I do so, I would like to make some brief remarks about other aspects that relate to sentencing, and also to the prison system.

We debated deportation orders last week, and voted on them last night. Most people in this country— but not, I think, the majority of this House—favour deportation orders, subject to two important provisos. The first is this: it is highly desirable that a foreign national sentenced to a serious period of imprisonment should be required to serve a substantial part of that sentence in the United Kingdom before deportation. The reason is that there is too great a chance that on deportation, the receiving country—unless there is an appropriate agreement in place—will simply let him walk free. That is what has happened to Mr Hadush Kebatu on his release to Ethiopia. The second proviso is this: in order to satisfy the principle of proportionality, an automatic deportation order should arise only in the event of serious offences, marked by a significant period of imprisonment. The threshold period will be a matter for debate.

My next general point relates to non-custodial sentences, of which I am a very strong supporter. However, in order to reassure the public, the non-custodial sentence must serve the public interest in a very obvious way, and must also be enforced with rigour. That means a properly financed and resourced Probation Service, among other things. I entirely agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said about the Probation Service, and I welcome the fact that financing has been significantly increased.

My next point is to emphasise the importance of purposeful out-of-cell activity for prisoners in custody. I know the Minister agrees with this. There should be much more concentration on remedial education and training for employment. Far too many prisoners are spending far too long locked up in their cells, and that is quite wrong.

My next general point relates to what happens on discharge. It is essential that there is a proper package of support for discharged prisoners and, most important of all, the prospect of employment. I give credit to the Minister in respect of his pre-ministerial career in this matter. Your Lordships will have noticed that quite a lot of the recently released prisoners were simply shown the door. So far as I could see, they had no proper support, and that is quite wrong. Again, it reverts to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, that we require a properly resourced and funded Probation Service.

The last of my general points, before I come to the IPPs, is on independent monitoring boards. I was the Prisons Minister under my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell many years ago. He was a most distinguished Home Secretary, as he was a most distinguished Foreign Secretary. I served under him and became very familiar with monitoring boards. When I retired from the House of Commons, I became a member of the monitoring board of our local prison. Along with the inspectorate, the monitoring boards are a vital means of scrutinising what goes on in individual establishments. I hope that the Minister will encourage boards to be as candid and as critical as the facts justify, and that he will encourage prison governors to enable the boards to fulfil the functions that I think they should.

I turn now to the IPPs, which are rightly characterised as an enduring stain on our judicial system. I am not going to repeat the relevant facts in any detail. Noble Lords will find all the detail that they require in excellent briefing notes by the Library of the House of Lords. A very helpful report was published in 2022 by the Justice Committee of the House of Commons and, most recently, a very important report was produced in June 2025 by the Howard League for Penal Reform. It is a report in which the former Lord Chief Justice, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, was intimately involved, as was my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier.

I acknowledge that there has been some progress in the action plan now in place but, alas, the progress has been too slow. On 31 December 2024, there were still 695 unreleased prisoners who had been in prison for more than their tariff and, indeed, for more than 10 years. Unsurprisingly, self-harm and suicide are much higher for this category of prisoner than for any other. As of March 2025, 94 people on IPPs had taken their own lives while in prison, and this is deplorable. One has to ask oneself what we do about this enduring crisis, bearing in mind that there is an action plan already in place. As I have said, the action plan is proceeding too slowly. That is not surprising, as many prisons do not provide the courses that are required to enable a prisoner to proceed towards release. The House of Commons committee in 2022 recommended the resentencing of individual IPP prisoners. That is a proposal that I probably did support, and I certainly would support.

However, that recommendation was refused by the previous Government and, indeed, by the present Government. I do not imagine that a change of mind is going to occur in the near future. Consequently, the Howard League has come forward with seven interlocking and mutually supporting recommendations. The most important of these is the proposal for a two-year conditional release scheme for IPP prisoners. The recommendation is that, in IPP cases,

“the Parole Board should be asked to set a date as to when the person will be released within a two-year window”,

together with what has to be done to achieve public safety. The report quite rightly sets out a range of safeguards, together with a mechanism for setting aside the release date if there is a requirement for that decision.

The recommendation for a conditional release date, together with the other recommendations in the report, seems a very sensible way forward, but I do not want to be unduly prescriptive in this debate. I suggest that early progress is essential to mitigate and, I hope, resolve an undoubted scandal. I hope that, in the context of this Bill, there will be cross-party discussions that result in serious amendments of a kind likely to commend themselves to this Government, and that thereby we can reasonably hope to see an early resolution to a very serious injustice.

17:41

[Baroness Prashar (CB)]

My Lords, before I make my remarks, I declare two interests. I am a member of the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Lords, which is so admirably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Foster. I am also an officeholder of the All-Party Group on Penal Affairs.

The Bill sets out important reforms to reduce the unnecessary use of custodial sentences, tackle over- crowding, reduce offending and protect victims. I welcome all that, but I want to highlight some of my concerns, which I hope we can deal with in Committee.

The Bill quite rightly bolsters suspended sentences. However, we must guard against more use of suspended sentences instead of community orders, because evidence shows that suspended sentences are imposed on those who should have received community orders. Community orders are not a soft option. With the right investment, intensive community sentences can succeed where short sentences fail. We know that community orders are flexible and allow individuals to tackle the root causes of offending by engaging with mental health, alcohol and drug treatment while retaining their work, home and community ties.

We know that the use of community sentences has more than halved in recent years. We need to encourage greater use of community orders, not less. We also know that female offenders in particular benefit from community orders. The committee on which I sit published a report, Cutting Crime: Better Community Sentences, which highlighted a number of best practices in this area—which, given the time, I will not repeat. If we do not use these sentences, it will defeat the Bill’s objective by simply delaying custodial sentences.

While greater use of community orders is desirable, we also know that, as others have said, their full potential will not be maximised until the Probation Service is fully functional. The Government’s commitment to invest £700 million is welcome, but there will be a shortfall of staff and a time lag in getting staff levels and training up to speed to meet the Bill’s expectations. Furthermore, the Probation Service needs community-based voluntary organisations to be effective. When services are provided locally, various agencies can co-operate effectively. In our report, we argue:

“The colocation and co-commissioning of services are the gold standard”.


Investment in the Probation Service and community-based organisations is crucial if we are to maintain public trust in community sentences.

The earned progression model in the Bill differs from that recommended by the independent sentencing review. The Bill does not include incentives to engage in purposeful activity within the prison before release. There are, however, challenges to the implementation of an earned progression framework, particularly while someone is in prison. Issues of concern—some of them have been highlighted—are, of course, the current overcrowding, a lack of purposeful activity, unequal progression within the prison estate, an unfair adjudication system and the problem of added days. These need to be tackled; without doing so, the progression model will be ineffective in easing the prison capacity crisis and reducing offending.

The second part of the progression model will see those released entering intensive supervision and increased use of electronic monitoring or tagging. The Government have confirmed that tagging will be automatically applied to offenders at the point of release into the second part of the progression model. It is estimated that this would double the number of those tagged. Tagging can be an effective part of community supervision, but at present there is no clear strategy, clarity or guidelines on how the expansion of the use of tagging should be monitored and its impact on the Probation Service.

Disproportionate use of tagging can be counter- productive, particularly for women. Furthermore, small technical breaches that do not amount to reoffending could result in incarceration, thus defeating the objective of the Bill. Earlier this month, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee sent a letter to the Ministry of Justice on the use of electronic monitoring, to which I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Foster, will refer.

To succeed, this Bill will require investment in the Probation Service, promotion of the benefits of community orders and a clear strategy on tagging. My final concern is, of course, about the Sentencing Council, which has already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Beith, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett of Maldon. I will not go into it; all I will say is that, although I recognise the importance of Parliament’s role in overseeing sentencing policy, forcing accountability and monitoring its effectiveness, this measure risks the Executive curtailing the independence of the Sentencing Council. The reaction to what happened before, when we had the other Bill, was rather over the top and this particular measure is, in my view, unnecessary. We should concentrate on sentencing and supporting the Sentencing Council’s independence in any way we can.

17:47

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I must add to the tributes to that great, brave and humane soul, Baroness Newlove.

It is, as we have heard, over 30 years since two political pugilists faced off from opposite Dispatch Boxes in the other place and triggered a law and order arms race from which our criminal justice system and the society it is supposed to serve have yet to recover. For decades, this excited expectations that Governments could legislate their way to headlines and re-election by diminished due process and tougher sentencing. They purported to do this even when imposing economic austerity, in the form of cuts to living standards and the justice system in particular, as well as youth, mental health and addiction services. Today, we reap the bitter harvest in both the human and the financial costs of a justice and penal system that is on its knees, in which few members of the public have faith.

By contrast, and with no disrespect to the elected Chamber, my noble friend Lord Timpson is a perfect example of the finest Government Ministers sitting in your Lordships’ House, bringing a wealth of experience, expertise and vocation for genuine reform. Not, perhaps, since the fictional progressive prison warden Henry Brubaker, played by the late Robert Redford in the 1980 Hollywood film, went inside disguised as a convict, has one man attempted such a brave reforming challenge. Of course, my noble friend comes disguised not as an inmate but as a politician. None the less, I pay tribute to him, and indeed to the much respected Conservative Lord Chancellor, David Gauke, whose sentencing review has inspired so much of the Bill before us. In particular, I commend a focus on preventing and reducing crime and diverting people away from prison so far as possible. Such aims are nothing short of a sea change from decades of crime and sentencing legislation drafted, if not quite on the back of a cigarette packet, on the back of rainforests of press releases full of punitive talk and sentence inflation.

Talk is cheap and legislation not much more expensive. The exorbitant cost comes later, in failed sentences and overstuffed prisons where rehabilitation programmes are all but impossible. The continuing cost is of reoffending and the revolving door—and I do not mean the one outside your Lordships’ House. The Bill must, of course, come with sufficient funds to implement it—adequate funds for our crumbling courts and demoralised probation, third sector and prison services—otherwise, this once-in-a-generation possibility of reversing the vicious cycle will be set up to fail.

I wholeheartedly welcome the presumption against short sentences, and the discretion to suspend short custodial sentences in the light of decades of data on reoffending. How hollow were those slogans of yesteryear about a “short, sharp shock” and how “prison works”? However, it is vital that suspended sentences translate into less custody, not fewer community orders, as we heard from the noble Baroness. Investment, training, monitoring and constant evaluation in every part of the system will be key.

By contrast, the new consent process for the Sentencing Council smacks a little more of the press release than sound policy. The will of the people on matters of sentencing is properly expressed by Parliament’s role in scrutinising and enacting sentencing legislation. The Sentencing Council exists to help the independent judiciary achieve consistency within the realm of its discretion. The Lord Chancellor of the day is, in practice, the initiator of sentencing legislation; they need not and should not be co-signing off on the Sentencing Council’s business plan and guidance documents. It is an encroachment on the independent judiciary, worthy of some of the political judge-bashing of the past. If the new process is not to be dropped, at the very least perhaps the Justice Committee rather than the Lord Chancellor should co-sign with the Lady Chief Justice. In any event, that committee is more reflective of Parliament than a senior member of the Executive is.

In the context of standard custodial sentences, the new progression model will need careful consideration. I urge my noble friends in government carefully to read the concerns of both Justice and the Howard League for Penal Reform. I know that many noble Lords are appreciative of their work in general and providing detailed written briefings on this Bill in particular. Only adequate, purposeful activity in prison can ensure progression rather than regression. There must be clear guidance on how the model should be implemented; the prison adjudication system must be reviewed as to fairness and potential discrimination, not least against disabled and otherwise vulnerable prisoners. The increase in the possibility of added days for bad behaviour must be carefully monitored and reviewed. There is a risk of some prisoners not being released until the very end of their sentence, with no subsequent probation requirements in the community.

Greater public faith and government investment in community orders is at the heart of the Bill. Care must be taken over the fairness, proportionality and unintended consequences of intensive supervision, restriction zones and electronic tagging. Offenders must be supported as well as supervised—and not set up to fail.

Clause 35 is of serious concern, with its powers to publish the names and photographs of those serving orders in the community. I am reminded of an informal meeting I had as director of Liberty with a Home Office political adviser around 20 years ago. During the encounter, the adviser’s phone rang; when they realised who the caller was, they turned very pale and left the table for a few minutes. On their return, they asked me what I thought of an idea to force those on community orders to wear striped uniforms while performing unpaid manual work in the community. “What do you think I’ll say?”, I replied. “What do you really think in terms of safety, decency, rehabilitation and public order?” The adviser nodded silently but looked very anxious. The call had come from the editor of a national newspaper, demanding the policy as a story for the next day. As journalism is currently under fire, I shall withhold the name of the editor and paper concerned. I believe that the pillory was abolished in 1837, and the stocks fell out of use in around the 1870s, so let us not revive them in time for the 2030s.

Finally, I welcome the Bill’s amendments to the Bail Act 1976; in particular, adding to courts’ considerations a defendant’s pregnancy, primary care giving or situation as a victim of domestic abuse. I urge the department to go further and build on reforms in the Mental Health Bill to abolish remand in custody of people, including children, for their own welfare or protection, even for non-custodial offences. This is surely one of the most obvious symbols and examples of our criminal justice system being used as a dumping ground for social problems and vulnerable people who would be far better cared for and protected elsewhere, and at far less financial and human cost.

Overall, I congratulate the Government on creating such an opportunity for enlightened and effective reform. Because it is in his nature, I know that my noble friend Lord Timpson will seek to collaborate across the House on ensuring that this opportunity is taken to the best of our shared ability—including, I hope, on IPPs. I wish him well in his task and look forward to playing my own small part.

17:57

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Prison Reform Trust, but I add that my points here are mostly my own. I wholeheartedly support the Government’s ambition to rehabilitate more prisoners so that we move away from the endless cycle of successive Governments ramping up the length of sentences so as to be seen to be tough on crime. For far too long, sentencing law has been focused exclusively on punishment, and insufficient attention has been paid to the other statutory purposes of sentencing, especially reduction in crime and rehabilitation. We all know that 80% of offending is reoffending—a really shocking statistic.

I welcome the recommendations of the sentencing review, and there are many good things in the Bill that build on that review. However, the Bill has not implemented all the recommendations, even though the review considered them to be

“a holistic package of measures that will work best in conjunction with each other”.

Many points could be made but, for the purposes of Second Reading, I will focus on what I consider to be the most important area; namely, the way in which the Bill provides for so-called earned early release at the one-third point of the sentence, and the likely consequences of that. My comments will echo points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and indeed just now by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti.

Earned release is a commendable rehabilitative concept, which originated in the Criminal Justice Act 1967. That Act provided for Parole Board release for fixed-term prisoners at the one-third point of the sentence, if they had satisfied the board that they had been sufficiently rehabilitated so as to make it safe to release them—but it was a big if. A prisoner could be released on licence, with a two-thirds reduction in time served in prison, only if they could show they had taken steps to rehabilitate. That is not this Bill.

The Bill provides that a prisoner will earn early release at the one-third point merely by behaviour that avoids additional days for breaches of the prison rules; for example, offences against discipline, threatening, abusive or violent behaviour or possessing unauthorised articles. Immediately, one sees the likely adverse consequences of that approach. First, it will lead to a concentration of vulnerable and challenging prisoners within the prison environment. Individuals who struggle with multiple and complex needs, such as mental health, neurodiversity and substance dependence, are most likely to break prison rules and get placed on report and adjudications. Over time, therefore—and we must look at the long term, since this Bill will probably remain the law for years to come—the prison population will comprise a disproportionate number of people who have not accessed early release due to this factor.

Secondly, who will award additional days and on what basis? This becomes a critical issue if early release at the one-third point is to depend on avoiding such adjudications. If it is prison officers, that could clearly be open to abuse. It could also negatively impact on staff-prisoner relationships.

Thirdly, is avoiding additional days for things such as threatening, abusive or violent behaviour so as to gain early release really “earning it” in a meaningful sense? The 1967 Act experience teaches us that release is only truly “earned” if the offender engages in meaningful purposeful activity and attends any required work, education, treatment and/or training obligation where these are available. Only then can they be said to have taken steps to rehabilitate before their release. In an ideal world, therefore, release at the one-third point should not be automatic merely by avoiding punishment. It should be properly earned—as was recommended by the sentencing review—so as to demonstrate that the prisoner is less likely to reoffend or breach licence conditions when in the community and end up being recalled to prison.

I recognise that Clause 20 is partly an emergency mechanism to alleviate current capacity pressures. To provide that release at the one-third point must depend on engagement in purposeful activity might deprive Clause 20 of its utility, since the state of capacity and staffing crisis in prisons are such that access to such activity is severely limited. However, this means that the burden of rehabilitating prisoners will fall exclusively on the Probation Service, which will already be on its knees with the upsurge in community sentences. There is a massive danger that, in trying to create more prison capacity with release at the one-third point, the measure might in fact diminish it because of the number of recalls.

This is not fanciful. Let us take the number of prisoners who were released early last Autumn under the Government’s emergency release scheme SDS40: MoJ figures published on 30 October show that, between April and June, there were more than 11,500 releases under the SDS40 scheme and over 10,000 recalls, which is 15% higher than in the same quarter in 2024 and is a record high. Although some of these recalls may have been unrelated to the scheme, the department acknowledges that the unprecedented increase was likely driven partly by the implementation of SDS40. If there has been such an increase following release at the 40% point, how much worse might it be if prisoners are released at the one-third point under this Bill? Meaningful purposeful activity in prison before release would surely have reduced the number of such recalls.

But I recognise that the Government are between a rock and a hard place on this: on the one hand, they need to release more prisoners early so as to create more capacity and, on the other, they risk putting so much pressure on the Probation Service that a large number of released prisoners will be recalled to prison, thereby defeating the whole point of Clause 20. I do not know the answer to this in the short term, which must surely depend partly on a vast injection of new probation resources, the like of which we have never seen. Even then, you cannot wave a magic wand to produce overnight significantly more trained probation officers with the experience to deal with the increased burden. Whatever the answer in the short term, it still leaves the long-term problem of how purposeful activity in prison can, at some future point when capacity issues have subsided, be made a requirement before release at the one-third point. Otherwise, prisoners will have no incentive to participate in such activity, since Clause 20 will guarantee their release at the one-third point anyway.

Something needs to be done now, since otherwise Clause 20 will continue, unless amended by a future Bill, to require release at the one-third point irrespective of whether prisoners have taken steps to rehabilitate. The burden of rehabilitating prisoners would then, for the foreseeable future, fall exclusively on the Probation Service. One suggestion, so as to build some flexibility into the system now, would be to insert an enabling power in Clause 20 for regulations to be made which, at a future point, when capacity and resources allow, would enable Clause 20 to be modified so as to incorporate a requirement for purposeful activity. This would give the department the option of modifying Clause 20 in the future without the need for a fresh Bill. It would keep the options open, which is never a bad idea where prisons and probation are concerned.

18:05

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, this is obviously a Bill with good aims: to reduce the prison population and put more resources into probation and rehabilitation. However, the problem is that the prison population is going up in the long term because Governments keep coming up with new reasons to lock people up.

We have had a lot of briefings on this particular Bill, and a recurring theme across them is the issue of resourcing capacity within the probation and rehabilitation system. Several organisations, notably Justice, stress that without significant investment in probation services and community-based interventions, the proposed reforms risk placing unrealistic demands on an already overstretched system. The Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust caution that, while the Bill may provide short-term relief to the prison estate, it will not be sufficient to address the long-term growth in the prison population, which is driven by sentence inflation and systemic pressures. For example, the Government estimate that the Sentencing Bill will reduce demand for prison places by 7,500 places by 2028. This reduction is achieved through a combination of reforms, including changes to sentencing, release points, recall processes and remand measures. Despite this, the prison population is still projected to increase by 2,000 people by 2029.

Concerns that the proposed earned progression model risk becoming a mechanism that punishes poor behaviour, rather than genuinely rewarding good conduct, are certainly valid. There is the danger that adding additional days through the prison adjudication system would result in a prisoner reaching the end of their sentence without the licence period. In addition, increasing use of fixed-term recourse to prison will not improve the situation for victims or offenders. I have heard from those working with victims of domestic abuse about their fears of offenders being re-released without any assessment at all of the risk they pose to the people they have offended against. Of course, they are being put back on the streets and could commit crimes against other people. This certainly does not improve the lives of those being recalled. Sending somebody back to prison for 56 days does not allow them access to any offending behaviour work or reduce risks but simply holds them in an overcrowded prison before they come back out, often having lost their accommodation and any progress that they made before the recall.

On the probation resources, there is broad support across organisations for the presumption against short custodial sentences of 12 months or less and for extending the courts’ powers to suspend custodial sentences of up to three years. The Justice briefing underlines the need for adequate resourcing of various services, alongside guidance and training for practitioners. The Howard League, Justice and the Prison Reform Trust stress that the implementation of these provisions must ensure a genuine reduction in the use of custody, rather than the reconfiguration of existing penalties. Refuge urges the Government to ensure that domestic abuse offenders are exempted from the presumption against short custodial sentences and that appropriate monitoring arrangements are established.

While I welcome using rehabilitation measures in the community, as opposed to in prisons, a clear theme runs through many of the briefings we have received, which is that without serious investment, the proposed reforms risk collapsing under their own weight. I would be very interested to hear the Minister reassure us on that, because we could spend endless amounts of money, but if it is not spent in the right way, it is a terrible waste.

There are many issues that I wish I could pick up. The Howard League supports amendments to the Bail Act 1976, designed to reduce unnecessary remand, particularly for pregnant women, primary care givers and the victims of domestic abuse. Justice further advocates for the removal of the courts’ powers to remand individuals for their own protection, including children remanded on welfare grounds.

Although it is not included in the Bill, the Law Society highlights the opportunity for the Government to revisit the resentencing of individuals serving indeterminate sentences for public protection, as previously recommended by the Justice Committee in 2022. As the Minister knows well, IPP prisoners have been languishing in prison for petty crimes. On IPP releases, in August, 172 were freed for the first time, while it will take an estimated decade to free 2,544 prisoners still trapped in their sentences.

I would like a commitment from the Government, if they are keen on bringing down the number of prisoners, to please not release men charged with domestic abuse and stalking who repeatedly harass women. Here are three things that the Government could do instead: abolish the draconian anti-protest laws that result in five-year prison sentences for hanging a banner over a bridge; reverse the proscription of Palestine Action, which has led to hundreds of arrests for sitting down peacefully and holding up signs; and, personally, I want the Home Office focused on keeping violent prisoners in prison and letting peaceful protesters out on the streets to try to make the world a better place.

18:12

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness.

I find myself speaking in the company of very distinguished and knowledgeable noble Lords, with great judicial experience and knowledge of the sentencing system in its widest sense. I am not in that company. I would venture to say, though, that I have considerable sympathy with what the Government are trying to achieve here. I have doubts about the efficacy of ever longer prison sentences, and indeed about their purpose. Listening to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, I allowed myself a measure of doubt about whether we have a clear notion of the purpose of prison. After all, prison as we understand it is a relatively modern idea; it goes back only to Jeremy Bentham. It is a sort of 200-year experiment. If the right reverend Prelate is going to give us an opportunity, in the course of the Bill, to give some consideration to what we are actually trying to achieve and whether we are succeeding, that might be of some general benefit.

However, I want to follow the speech so eloquently made by my noble friend Lord Hailsham, when he spoke about IPP prisoners, a subject also referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. This scandal continues to fester. At its height, in 2012, there were 6,000 prisoners subject to the IPP regime. According to the latest figures supplied by the Ministry of Justice, 14 years later, that figure has now come down to 2,422 in custody, 1,476 of whom are on recall. Nearly 1,000—946—have never been released, 14 years after the sentence was abolished. Many of them, I think nearly all of them now, are beyond the tariff that they deserved and were given at the time of their original sentencing. Many of them are years, as much as a decade, beyond the tariff that they were given.

One has to acknowledge progress and good will. Undoubtedly, the Minister, but also his predecessors from a previous Government, have come to this task with great good will, a recognition of the injustice and a wish to bring it to an end, but the furthest that they have been able to go when dealing with those prisoners who are in prison is an action plan, which has not materially changed with the change of government. The last Government, as we know, made considerable progress, in the Victims and Prisoners Act, in alleviating the position of prisoners who are out on licence, but my focus is on those who are not out on licence but still in prison for one of the two reasons I have mentioned: either never released or on recall.

The action plan has certainly seen a reduction in numbers—even in the last year, numbers have been reduced—but if one focuses briefly on those who have never been released, one sees that the action plan is losing its effectiveness, because one is getting to that number of prisoners who will always be a challenge for the probation system to approve for release, many of them because of mental health difficulties acquired as a result of their experiences while serving the sentence. The challenge for the Minister is to recognise that there needs to be something over and above the action plan to help deal with those people and find some path back to giving them justice—justice being simply that one serves the sentence that arises as a result of the crime one has committed. We see very little sign of that, but the Bill offers us opportunities to do it.

We have seen ideas. The Justice Committee in the Commons, late in the last Government, had a proposal for resentencing—the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, has a live Private Member’s Bill which would put that into effect. We have great hopes, I think, in the report of the Howard League more recently, chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd—who I am glad to see in his place and due to speak later in this debate—the essential effects of which were described by my noble friend Lord Hailsham. The question for the Minister is whether he intends, with vigour, to take up some of the ideas being offered to him; whether he will use the Bill as a means of doing so; and whether he will enter urgent talks. I cannot criticise him for failing to talk to noble Lords. He has been very good about holding cross-party round tables—in fact, his secretary is in the process of organising another one for next month—but will he sit down, as my noble friend suggested, in the course of the Bill and engage in cross-party discussions as to how the Bill can become a vehicle for addressing, in particular, those who have no hope of release, whether through the recommendations of the Howard League or some other means? That would be a huge advance.

I leave those thoughts with noble Lords. It is a huge omission that the Government have so far not included them in the Bill. The Minister began by saying that they were not included, but there are enough of us across the House to see amendments tabled, perhaps with some effect, to bring them back into the Bill. This is the opportunity in this parliamentary session to do that and, if the opportunity passes, more time will be lost and more unjustified suffering will be endured as a result of our lack of dispatch and engagement with this issue.

18:20

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who makes some very important points.

I begin by joining the tributes that have been made to the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, who was a doughty supporter for the victims of crime and will be much missed. I pay tribute also to David Gauke for his excellent report, and also to the Minister, who, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said, is a breath of fresh air, and certainly could never be accused of kicking the can down the road.

As my noble friend Lord Beith pointed out, we on these Benches are very supportive of much of the Bill, but we have some concerns. However, rather than addressing the many concerns that others have raised, I will concentrate on a more general concern I have that we will simply not achieve the Bill’s intended ends unless we supply the means to do so. Frankly, I am concerned that this is currently not the case.

I will illustrate this by reference to three recent reports by your Lordships’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee, which I have the great privilege to chair. In particular, all three reports have made it absolutely clear that whatever sentence is imposed on an offender should provide punishment but also measures that reduce reoffending, as a key means of keeping the public safe and reducing the prison population, as the noble Lord, Lord Carter, demonstrated very well earlier.

The Bill provides measures to replace short-term prison sentences. This was called for in the committee’s report, Cutting Crime: Better Community Sentences, under the then chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. After all, the reoffending rate of prisoners released from short sentences is a staggering 61.2%—and that is after it has cost over £53,000 for each prisoner, 13 times more expensive than the cost of community sentences.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, made very clear earlier, while community sentences have a much lower reoffending rate, the committee was clear that much needed to change if they are to reach their full potential of turning round the lives of offenders and supporting them to avoid reoffending.

For example, many offenders have a key problem in relation to drug, alcohol or gambling addiction, or with mental health issues, yet the current provision of support for addiction services has fallen and fewer than 2% of those with mental health issues even start treatment. So the Bill can propose an increase in non-custodial sentences, but that will not help reduce reoffending—and so reduce the number of people in prison—unless measures are in place to boost mental health and addiction support services. So I hope that the Minister when he winds up will explain how that is going to be done and funded.

As others have said, the greatest concern is in relation to the Probation Service. The Bill will require the Probation Service to manage many more issues, including a large increase in the number of community orders and a near doubling of the number of people being tagged. Yet the Probation Service is already facing significant shortfalls in staffing and so is unable to do all of what is already being asked of it. A community sentence order is rarely given without a pre-sentence report, yet, because of staff shortages, the number of such reports has fallen dramatically. How can the Bill expect a significant increase in the preparation of such reports if the service cannot even cope with the current demand?

So there is an urgent need to address staffing and retention in the Probation Service to cope with more pre-sentence reports, more supervision of those on community orders and more supervision of those who are going to be tagged. Without it, the Probation Service is being set up to fail.

The Government of course increased staff numbers by 1,000 last year and has promised a further 1,300 this year, but these numbers, even with better use of new technology, are unlikely to meet the demand, which some estimates suggest may be as many as 10,000. As he did in his opening remarks, the Minister may well point to the promised £700 million over four years, but we still have no clarity on how much of that will be spent on additional staff and their training. I hope the Minister will provide that clarity at the end of the debate, but, with much of the money likely to be spent on housing, it is therefore unlikely there will be enough to boost staffing to the level required by the Bill’s proposals.

In that respect, the Bill’s financial impact assessment is deeply worrying. It says:

“Across all the Bill measures, the impact on probation is estimated to lead to a modest increase in average annual costs of £4.5 million”.


Surely that is complete nonsense. It goes on to say that there will be additional costs for increased tagging and supervision of prisoners released early through the progression model. But these costs are not provided. Rather, the assessment says that the costs of this expansion are “being considered” by the department as part of funding allocations. What confidence can we have that the means will be provided to achieve the Bill’s aims?

Additional funding for the Probation Service is not all that is needed for the expansion of tagging, not least to reduce reoffending. As the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said, the committee has made a number of recommendations, including the need for a new electronic monitoring strategy. Given the lamentable performance of the current private contractors, we suggested that consideration should be given to bringing the management and operation of EM services under the control of the Probation Service, or at least an increase in the number of private providers to increase competition.

Without these and other recommendations, alongside more funding and many more well-trained probation staff, there will not be a successful electronic monitoring expansion or a successful expansion of truly effective community service sentences, and the Probation Service really will be set up to fail.

The Bill also aims to reduce the size of the prison population, but many offenders will still end up in prison, where, as recent media reports show, the Prison Service is already failing. This is not surprising. As was clear from the committee’s report, Better Prisons: Less Crime, much of the blame must lie with successive Governments, which have increased the level of sentences and failed to provide the service with the staffing numbers and support it needs.

As prisoner numbers have risen, staffing levels have fallen. There are fewer prison officers now than even a year ago. We now know that 13% leave every year, half of them having spent less than a year in the service. Nor has the judiciary been given adequate support: we now have a staggering 20% of the prison population comprising people on remand awaiting trial.

A crucial way to reduce overcrowding is by reducing reoffending. As the committee report reminds us, in addition to overcrowding, prisons are often in bad and unsanitary condition, with a maintenance backlog of nearly £2 billion. They face issues such as a shortage of funds, gangs operating with impunity, drones undermining security, an alarming availability of drugs and overstretched, inexperienced and demoralised staff in a service faced with a severe recruitment and retention crisis.

It is hardly surprising that prison staff have inadequate time and resources to provide prisoners with the support they need for mental health problems and addictions, or to provide them with training and educational opportunities that can prepare them for life outside. In the absence of such support, it is not surprising that the committee pointed out that 80% of offending is reoffending. It is estimated that it costs £18 billion a year, and of course it is a major contribution to the size of the prison population.

One of the best ways to reduce the prison population is through wider prison reforms, not least to reduce reoffending. Such reforms do not feature at all in the Bill but must be implemented alongside it, and the committee report provides many details about the reforms needed. Despite a fairly positive response to those recommendations, it is not entirely clear how well they will be implemented. After all, the Government agreed with the committee’s recommendation that there should be wider access to a more diverse range of educational opportunities in prisons, but then, just a few weeks later, announced plans to cut spending on prison education by 50%.

The Bill contains some controversial but many welcome proposals. However, it will be difficult to support them unless there is evidence that the means to implement them will be in place. At present, I believe that is open to question.

18:31

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I so want to be able to welcome this Bill; instead, I feel rather despondent. I ask the Minister, of whom I am something of a fan, not to take that personally.

The issue of sentencing matters—to me, to all of us here and to the public—and it has been rightly agitating the public of late. Recent debates have raged over controversial sentencing decisions. Lucy Connolly’s social media posts saw her sentenced to prison for longer than actual rioters who used violence against asylum hotels—is that the right kind of sentencing? Then there are the regular rows about whether some crimes are punished too lightly, whether mitigating circumstances are used too liberally and whether sentencing for serious offences such as sexual assault or child abuse adequately reflects those heinous crimes.

Conversely, many are concerned that some crimes are punished too heavily. Should activists be locked up for protesting? Are too many young people and women being locked up when better alternatives exist? Others worry about all the laws being pushed through Parliament that criminalise ever more activities. Over in the Crime and Policing Bill, we are seeing the creation of a plethora of new offences such as respect orders, the breach of which can lead to two years in prison. So there is plenty for us to discuss and debate in relation to sentencing.

In that spirit, I welcome the Bill’s attempt to clip the wings of the Sentencing Council. Debating sentencing is our responsibility, not a quango’s. I agree with the Justice Secretary’s point that any sentencing framework needs greater democratic oversight and that

“policy must be set by parliamentarians, who answer to the people”.

Let us be frank: the people are tearing their hair out about the mess that parliamentarians are making of sentencing and prisons as we speak. The now-weekly revelations of prisoners being freed from jail by mistake make a mockery of our deliberations here. What is the point of hours and hours pondering sentencing if, once they are sentenced, the system is going to let them go by accident? These are not harmless lags: of the 262 released by accident in the year to March 2025, 87 were convicted of violence against a person and three for sexual offences. Never mind the accidental releases—we have also witnessed the travesty of an emergency release scheme that has seen 38,000 prisoners released early for no other reason than official mismanagement of prisons.

Then there is another anomaly: too many criminals are not being caught to be sentenced, not because they are criminal masterminds but because the forces of criminal justice seem to have abandoned swathes of the country to lawlessness. We will all know friends, family members and colleagues whose stolen phones, laptops and bikes are fitted with tracker devices. When they report that to the police and say, “I know where it is, officer, and who has it”, the police shrug and do nothing. Let us not mention those many instances of mass shoplifting, which is such a scourge in so many communities yet is ignored by the authorities. These are criminals missing from our sentencing consideration because of state negligence, and the public are inevitably frustrated.

With that backdrop, it feels surreal and demoralising to be asked to have a meaningful debate about sentencing policy. But, ever hopeful, I hope that we can try to dig deeper, as this Second Reading debate has done, to consider all sides philosophically. Are ever-longer prison sentences the key to tackling crime, or is prison itself, as the Minister implied, creating more criminals than it is rehabilitating? I am worried that the Bill avoids those proper debates. Despite what the Minister said, the Bill will hem us in, because the Government’s justification for it is hooked on the problem of prison capacity and overcrowding. We are told that

“we cannot … build our way out of this crisis. Without significant reform, demand for places will outstrip supply by … early 2028”.

It is posited as a technical problem.

What is demoralising is that we are basically being told that we have no choice but to reform by reducing sentences. Regardless of what we think, or if we disagree, we are met with the retort, “It’s the overcrowding crisis, stupid”. The proposals in the Bill are all about reducing sentences—not based on principle but for technocratic ends, with a contested evidence base and without the resources, as we have heard.

One of the key proposals is to reduce by a further 10% early releases of fixed-term sentences. The public are already bewildered about why it is so routine to release prisoners after only 50% of their time inside. Then the Government’s recent emergency release scheme lopped off another 10%, which has meant that tens of thousands have been freed after serving 40% of their sentence. This Bill now suggests a further 10% reduction, to 30%. How can that do anything but make a mockery of sentencing? If someone is given a sentence of 15 years and will be out in five, what is the point of the original 15-year sentence in the first place?

Clause 1 introduces a presumption against the use of short custodial sentences of 12 months or less, so you get sentenced to a year in prison but will not go to prison. Meanwhile, suspended sentences will be expanded from two to three years. I am often on the prison reform side of such policies, and there may well be merit in bringing in either of those measures or even the leaked revelations that the majority of women prisoners should not be incarcerated. But the Government’s emphasis on freeing up space in prisons to justify such moves is likely to sideline the need to persuade the public, who might well query whether these policies will weaken deterrence or threaten public safety. Hiding behind the Damocles sword of an overcrowding crisis seems to be an evasion of political accountability and could well fuel public cynicism.

The choice of sentence has a real-world consequence. Take the case of Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, the Algerian sex offender mistakenly released from HMP Wandsworth, who was a repeat offender and visa overstayer when he was convicted in November 2024 for indecent exposure. He was then put on the sex offenders register for five years—fair enough—but his sentence was only an 18-month community order. That non-custodial sentence does not meet the threshold for automatic deportation, so when people ask why he was even in the country to offend, the answer is: sentencing choices. I have some worries that community orders and suspended sentences —forced through not based on efficacy but because we are told there is no room to lock people up—will create even more problems.

The Secretary of State, David Lammy, talks of expanding

“effective sentencing outside of prison”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/9/25; col. 1407.]

What does expanding effective sentencing outside of prison mean? It sounds as though communities are now expected to accommodate a quasi-militarised security and surveillance regime. It seems that convicts in the community can now be banned from certain pubs, attending sports and other public events, and confined to restrictive geographical zones, and, of course, there is more use of electronic monitoring. To me, that sounds more like prison than freedom. As the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, has asked, who is going to monitor all these provisions and supervise a huge influx of prisoners into our communities? It seems delusional to rely on an already overstretched Probation Service, as we have heard so eloquently expressed by so many people, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, who just summed up what the problems were.

The problem of probation gaps is one reason why we should not fool ourselves or the public by saying that using community resources and sentences as an alternative to incarceration is always humane, progressive or effective. This was the presumption of the Mental Health Bill, but as we debated that Bill earlier this year, the review of the Valdo Calocane case was published. Catastrophic errors in his medical treatment in the community led to schizophrenic Mr Calocane stabbing three innocent people to death, so we should not romanticise what punishment in the community means.

Finally, the Minister will not be surprised to hear that I cannot finish this speech without noting that, when sentencing policy goes wrong, it can wreck the lives of so many people, including prisoners, and discredit criminal justice. The imprisonment for public protection—the IPP—was a sentence brought in in 2003. It was so wrong-headed and such a stain on our justice system that it was abolished, and yet here we are, 13 years after that abolition, with, as we have heard, 2,500 prisoners still languishing on a sentence that went wrong. I just finish by stating that even the Prison Officers’ Association has hit out at the Government for clinging on to this grossly unjust sentence. Napo, representing probation officers, has called on the Government to “finish the job”. I really hope that we use this Bill to finish the job when it comes to IPP. “Prison overcrowding”, you say? Surely, the state can let out some obvious candidates: that is, at least some or quite a lot of the IPP prisoners.

18:41

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am co-chair of the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group, and I very broadly welcome this Bill as a logical and rational response to the serious problems of prison overcrowding and of years, even decades, of sentence inflation. I will focus my remarks on two areas, if I may: on concerns with the Bill expressed to me by the justice unions, especially Napo—formerly the National Association of Probation Officers—and also on something seriously lacking from the Bill, which has already been pointed out, namely a viable way to wipe away the vile stain of IPP sentences.

I echo the concerns raised in the other place on probation capacity, unpaid work and electronic monitoring, following warnings by Napo, which led to three amendments tabled, as the Minister knows, at Committee and Report stages. The first of these gave the chief inspector the power to delay any aspect of the Bill that places extra pressure on probation until the service is indeed ready. The second stopped the private sector profiting from the expansion of unpaid work orders or community sentences, which are only run by the Probation Service, charities, local authorities or other non-profit organisations. The third aimed to bring tagging operations into the public sector Probation Service and out of the hands of the failing and corrupt privateers, such as Serco and G4S. On this point, I note last week’s letter to Ministers from the Justice and Home Affairs Committee warning that probation is being “set up to fail” with electronic monitoring. It also called for an independent review on tagging

“with a view to operating parallel contracts managed by a fully funded and supported Probation Service”—

something staff would very much agree with; I have no doubt about that.

I raise these points today because, unfortunately, none of the concerns was addressed during the debates in the other place, nor has the promised union meeting with Commons Ministers materialised. That is what I believe. I hope that, by my putting all this on record, the Minister will appreciate the depth of feeling among front-line staff on these issues and seek to reassure them appropriately.

Turning to IPP sentences, I have listened to the previous contributions, including from the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham. He talked about “progress, but”—and it is a big but—and he gave a tremendous overview of IPP and its potential way forward. As always on this subject, the contributions from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, were outstanding, and I thank them on behalf of prisoners and their relatives.

Your Lordships will know that I am currently sponsoring a Private Member’s Bill, as has been mentioned, to resentence everyone still serving these torture sentences. IPP resentencing was debated when this Bill passed through the Commons with different amendments proposed by—wait for it—the Liberal Democrats and the chair of the Justice Select Committee. Although the power of the Whip meant that these initiatives were unsuccessful, it is important to continue to use this Bill to highlight the plight of IPP prisoners, both to pressure the Government and to continue to raise public awareness.

That is why I intend to table my own amendment on IPP resentencing, based on the text of my Bill and incorporating the helpful amendments proposed by Members of the Committee on my Bill. These include the secure-hospital backstop proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, so that anyone whom the resentencing court considered too mentally ill to be released into the community yet could be moved to a secure hospital to receive badly needed therapeutic resources. I wish to table this new amendment, because I want the Government to put their objections to it on the record, for them to be judged fully and fairly in the future by action on IPP—not just warm words and slow actions, which, unfortunately, is still the case at the moment.

It genuinely pains me to say this, but I am starting to lose a little bit of faith that Parliament will fix this appalling injustice that Parliament itself created well over 20 years ago. That does not mean we should give up fighting—no, not at all. We must fight harder, for fairness and, indeed, for justice. But until we see an ITV docudrama made about this scandal, like “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, or until MPs’ mailboxes are full of messages from constituents, our best hope lies with the courts and with them showing the justice and mercy that successive Governments have failed to. That is why it so important for the Minister to explain the Government’s position fully and fairly on why they will not support resentencing with a secure-hospital backstop.

As perverse as it might sound, the more stubborn and unreasonable the Government sound, the more likely it is that the judiciary will side with those of us who are desperate to end this injustice. Indeed, so will the United Nations, which is currently considering a complaint brought by IPP campaigners against our own Government. It is shameful. People imprisoned for public protection and their families know that there are a growing number of us in this House and in the other place that will not give up until this stain is wiped clean. Noble Lords had better believe that.

In finishing, I repeat what my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti said: I give compliments to our Minister, who deserves praise where praise is due. I look forward to the Minister’s response and to a further debate on these issues as the Bill progresses and to our next IPP update on 10 December.

18:48

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, in this Second Reading debate, I will open by speaking about women who cannot speak for themselves and highlight what I think are two significant omissions. First, may I associate myself with the comments on IPP sentences made by the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, whom I have the pleasure to follow, and others. I had never heard of these until I held my first MP surgery and I was visited by a prisoner’s mother. She told me the whole sorry story. I was totally shocked, and I never understood why the last Government, which I served in as a junior Minister, did not fix this. It is a matter of deep regret to me, and I wish we had done something about it while we had the chance.

I pay tribute to the campaigners and families I had the privilege of working alongside while I served as Safeguarding Minister. Poppy Devey Waterhouse was just 24 when she was stabbed more than 100 times by her ex-boyfriend in her own home. Her killer, who had subjected her to coercive and controlling behaviour, received a minimum term of 16 years. Joanna Simpson was bludgeoned to death by her estranged husband in front of their children. He received 13 years. These are not isolated tragedies. They are the visible tip of a system that still treats domestic homicide as less grave than other murders.

The families of these women, particularly Carole Gould and Julie Devey, who lead the Killed Women campaign, have fought for years to expose this injustice. I thank them for briefing me ahead of this debate. Their campaign has attracted support from across the House and the other place and has revealed how many domestic murders involve what forensic experts call overkill —multiple stab wounds, strangulation, bludgeoning, and coercive control. Yet those killings, which are often triggered when the victim tries to end a relationship, attract lower starting points than murders of strangers in the street. For a man who takes a knife out of his house intending to use it in public and commits murder, the penalty starts at 25 years. However, if that same knife is already in his kitchen drawer and he uses it to kill his partner after years of coercive control, the starting point is still just 15 years.

The Killed Women campaign asks that murders following a history of coercive or controlling abuse attract the same 25-year starting point as other aggravated murders and that the justice system collects and publishes data on domestic homicides to track patterns and ensure consistency. We began to look at this issue in the Wade review under the last Government. I understand how many factors are at play in the sentencing framework, as we have heard from many learned Members of your Lordships’ House, but this Bill is precisely the place to act. It is disappointing that the Government have not used the vehicle in front of us now.

While in opposition, I was often opposed by the now Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips. She argued passionately and repeatedly for reforms to toughen sentences for domestic homicide and to close the gap between murders committed in the home and those committed with a knife on the street. She called these measures essential to delivering justice for victims of domestic homicide. Now that she sits in government, she and her ministerial colleagues are noticeable by their silence on this issue. The Killed Women campaign said last December that they were told that the Law Commission review would take at least three years to complete, delayed by a lack of resources. Realistically, we will not see significant change until the next decade— so much for the current Government’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls. I hope that the Government reconsider their approach to this and come back to this in Committee.

The second omission in the Bill is the absence of explicit recognition of the, in my view, egregiously named honour-based abuse in our sentencing regime. To take one example, 20 year-old Somaiya Begum was murdered by her uncle in Bradford. The judge said that it was impossible to identify a motive, even though she had been under a forced marriage protection order. Without honour recognised in law, the very reason for her death was absent from the courtroom. There are many such cases. We usually prefix “honour-based abuse” with “so-called” because there is nothing honourable about such abuse. It is often family-orchestrated, community-endorsed and underpinned by the appalling logic that a woman who asserts her independence has brought shame on her family, shame that must be cleansed through violence.

According to Karma Nirvana, which runs the national helpline, around 80% to 85% of callers identify with a south Asian heritage—Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi —and around 90% are from Muslim, Sikh or Hindu backgrounds combined. Victims also include white British, eastern European, Christian and Traveller women, but data is very scant and patchy. We know that this form of abuse is found wherever patriarchal or collectivist values override individual rights. These are values which are alien to the freedoms that we hold dear in Britain. However, we must not shy away from these facts for fear of offending people. In the context of grooming gangs, we saw how the denial of cultural and communal drivers allowed abuse to persist for years in plain sight. An estimated 12 women a year are murdered in the UK to defend so-called honour, but these cases are too often hidden in wider domestic homicide statistics. I had the privilege of being the Minister who took the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022 through the other place, outlawing forced child marriage. I know that we can legislate when the will exists.

Back in 2024, Labour shadow Ministers proposed new clauses to make honour-based violence an explicit aggravating factor in sentencing for murder, ensuring that courts recognise its motive and the community pressures behind it. Again, Jess Phillips described it as essential to delivering justice and, again, the Government have not acted. Furthermore, the promised violence against women and girls strategy, due in summer or autumn—we are now in November—has still not been published. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner said in September that halving violence against women and girls within a decade was an ambitious and laudable target, yet this strategy is still delayed. No major funding has been announced for specialist domestic abuse services—and I fail to see where the momentum within government is coming from.

I finish by asking the Government: when will they fulfil their commitment to ensuring that honour-based abuse is an aggravated factor in sentencing—if not in this Bill, when? When will they fulfil their commitment to levelling up domestic homicide sentencing—if not in this Bill, when? When will they finally publish the long-promised violence against women and girls strategy, which is not directly in the Sentencing Bill but must include many elements connected to sentencing policy? These reforms are overdue. The women whose names I have mentioned this evening deserve not just to be remembered but to have the law changed.

18:56

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as the founder and vice-president of Catch22, the largest community preventive agency for those young potential offenders. Before that, I was the chairman and founder of Crime Concern, which I served for 21 years before creating Catch22. As the Minister knows, because he came to see it, I founded My Brother’s Keeper, working in 14 prisons across the UK in the last year, especially HMP Isis, where for the last two and a half years our team has seen a 30% reduction in violence in what was one of the most despairing prisons but is now one of the most positive. I have spent 37 years visiting prisons and intensely over the last 11 years have encountered hundreds of men who have told me their very personal and very deep and serious stories. I do not see in the Bill—yet—any substantial vision of what reform should look like or the value of sentencing to change our culture of fear about crime.

I pay tribute to the Minister for his very engaging efforts with so many of us about issues of concern that we feel very deeply. He is open, he is effective, he communicates with us well and we all realise that he is doing a really good job against what seems to be a lack of government vision on the subject. What we see from his second boss, his new boss, is a lot of excuse-making about what is not working and from his previous boss a crowing enthusiasm for 130,000 prison places. Does the Minister still believe that we need 130,000 prison places and are we proud of that fact? Surely we should be ashamed of wanting to grow our prison estate—unless we are replacing antiquated rat-filled prisons. Why do we want to become the most incarcerating state in the world after the United States? That cannot be a good outcome.

I raise this because after all the hype that the last Government gave us—a royal commission on criminal justice, promised in 2019 in the Conservative manifesto, declared in the Queen's Speech in 2019, repeated six times in Oral Questions in this House but never done—here we are, all these years on, with no royal commission and in this Bill a migraine-making management roll of measures. It is “Add, add, add, add, change, change, change, change, but don’t substantially transform”. Of course it is better to have more effective, shorter sentences and a more brilliant, engaged probation service. No one disputes that this will improve things. However, the real problem, identified by so many already in this debate, is the pressure on repeat offending. That pressure on repeat offending, besides IPP, which I shall come back to, is that we are churning people back into a system where change has not substantially happened.

The Minister rightly cited, and let us be grateful for it, mechanisms in Texas for which we can see good outcomes—let us copy the best of all those mechanisms. But I went, as the Minister knows, to Medellín in Colombia last year, to Pablo Escobar’s former prison, and to many other prisons in Colombia. I saw a major difference between government prisons, with a repeat offending rate at around 70%—slightly higher than our own—and prisons run by the Prison Fellowship network, in Colombia and Brazil, and in Nigeria, where I visited them as well, with a repeat offending rate of 17%.

If charities and organisations recognise that dignity changes people’s outcomes, and that when people are reformed they do not come back, we must ask: why are we building more prison places to keep people in, rather than investing in better second chances processes, as well as relationships, that will lead to an effective culture of reform, rehabilitation and positive, affirmed relationships, and set people free to become citizens again in a positive culture of renewal?

Here I identify so closely with the speech by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester in which she recognised that relationships are what is needed to fulfil that transformation. My own experience in 37 years of prison visiting, and the last intense 10 years of weekly prison engagement, is that I have seen fantastic individuals who were the worst of people completely changed into some of the best of friends, and it is possible, deliverable and cheap to do.

Confidence building does not require millions and billions of pounds, but it does require us and the Government to stop panicking the public constantly about those who come out of prison. Regular prison releases have always been a weekly experience, but when the Government set about releasing larger numbers, it was as though this had never been done before and we were led to believe that this was a crisis measure. Yes, in some ways it was a crisis measure, but what about suggesting that actually we do not need to panic the public severely and we need to build a better process of renewal and reform?

I want to touch on some other areas. Recalls are back and probation, which, as the Bill sets out, is being expanded. We are grateful for that: more money for probation, better training, et cetera. But, as the Minister knows, it is so easy—too easy—for probation officers to press the panic button when they are not coping well, and when they do not feel they are getting compliance from a former offender, and to send them back to court.

Take Jordan—I will not reveal his full name—who finally found out yesterday that, 63 days after being recalled to a prison in Oxford on completely ridiculous, non-verifiable information, having been a category D prisoner and done 16 years of effective change, he will finally be out on Friday, having been banged back up by a probation officer’s bad misjudgment, which was recognised nine weeks later. People such as that are driven back constantly because a probation officer panics, fears and does not engage relationally with the individual.

Overreach is not dealt with in the Bill. I want to urge the Minister to not just consider how to get more probation officers or how to train probation officers, but how to prevent probation officers being the ones who have the absolute control. Many Members have already mentioned that there is a real need for recall to prison to be up to the courts. It should not be up to individuals who, under high stress, see too many back inside.

Remand is an area that is driving our prisons absolutely round the twist. I understand from information that was on Radio 4 yesterday that 40% of the youth estate is entirely based on remand. We used to have the principle in the United Kingdom that we believed that you were innocent until proven guilty. We now have multitudes of young men, largely, who are guilty and possibly may never be seen as innocent—hard trials taking years to arise.

I want to talk next about the possibility mentioned in the Bill of the shaming by photograph and name identification of people on community sentences. That can never be right. Any one of us who has worked with people who have had a community sentence, who are working through it to change and improve their lives and who are doing their duty fairly, know that to shame them in public is to destroy their relationships and community place, to see them at high risk and to put their children at severe risk. That is just bad politics and needs to be taken out of the Bill.

Lastly, on IPP, where so much has been said, we all believe that the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, in an amendment, should be fully supported. We should see a resentencing exercise. It is the worst gross injustice, yes, by the last Labour Government, but not corrected properly by the last Conservative Government, that has now been left as literally a big black hole of fearsome and painful places for individuals. We need a Nightingale courts process. If we could do it for the postmasters, who rightly deserve fairness and justice, let us do it for IPP—the people who are still on the sentence and still in prison.

Based on the calculations given by the Ministry of Justice, it will take eight more years to see everyone out who should be out. That is way beyond this Government’s term. Please, Minister, let us settle it, resolve it, bring it to an end and keep the public safe by admitting, honestly, that not everybody who has been to prison is an awful person—some are great.

19:06

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I want to start on the Sentencing Council and I want to say how sad and unfortunate it is that we have lost the Lord Justice Sir William Davis, who sadly died on 7 June. I believe that William Davis was a very fine public servant and, if anybody wants to assess what might be thought about him and his legacy, they should read his five-page letter of 27 March, written to the Lord Chancellor, which sets out the Sentencing Council’s position in relation to the demands which were at that time being made by the Lord Chancellor. It is not any part of my intention to go into the details of that disagreement; I will simply say both how sad it is and what an unfortunate loss it is that Sir William is no longer with us.

In talking about the Sentencing Council, I must say that I admire both the council and the scheme that was set up in the Act of 2009, and the work which has been done subsequent to the setting up of that scheme. I think the Council has done a fine job in its 15-year history. I will not go into my reasons for saying that, because your Lordships need only to read the speech from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, in order to have a full description of why. But I will go on to say that, in the opening speeches, the Minister seemed to be making some sort of move from what I have identified as a sort of panic stations response of the Government to the circumstances that have taken place since last March. I hope I am right, and I will read what he said very carefully and, of course, what he says in his response to the debate.

But I have to say, with some trepidation, that it is difficult for a Back-Bench member of the Conservative Party, who has been a speaking member of the Conservative Party for 75 years, to make a speech when my noble friend on the Front Bench has said nothing whatever about Clauses 18 and 19.

They are the two clauses that have been slipped into the Bill, as the Civil Service can advise Ministers to do, to warn us about what it may intend to do about the status of the Sentencing Council, which is a statutory non-departmental public body. The rest of what I will say is some interpretation of what that intention might be. It might be best if I go straight to the two questions that I was going to ask the Minister and then go back and explain why I am asking them.

My first question is: what is the democratic deficit that Clause 19 seeks to correct, and how has it come about? The second question is: how and when is Clause 19 intended to be implemented while keeping the confidence of the judiciary and the public intact?

I was subject to the National Heritage Act 1983, when a considerable number of non-departmental public bodies were put in place. I became the chairman of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew when it was turned into a non-departmental public body. Any interpretation of the Government’s position that implies that Parliament delegating some authority to a non-departmental body creates a democratic deficit is a very serious accusation. I believe that that, as this Government have said, raises a constitutional issue. I do not think there is any precedent for a non-departmental public body having its purpose reversed, and that is in effect what would happen if the council no longer issued definitive guidance and that guidance was instead, in effect, issued by Ministers.

That seems to me to be a constitutional issue. If there is no precedent, it is very serious. I very much hope that the Constitution Committee of this House, for example, has a look at the implications. That is probably enough about what may indeed be a constitutional issue.

There is a challenge to the council, which has not in fact been criticised for any form of democratic deficit. It has had, as I have seen it, the confidence of the judiciary, and that is very important. It has been responsible for providing information and trying to interpret that information as an assistance to the people who pass sentences. I have no comment to make on sentences as such; I simply say that that is what the council has done—it has provided information.

If noble Lords were to read the letter of 27 March, they would see that Sir William’s argument is: we have never interfered with policy, and it is no part of our purpose to interfere in policy; we are here to provide information as a form of guidance. Of course, nobody has to obey our guidance. It is guidance; it is not in any way enforceable. That is a very important point.

In conclusion, I am puzzled. I do not understand why the Government are taking this position in relation to the Sentencing Council. The Sentencing Council is a fine body and has done a very good job to date, and there is no reason to suppose that it cannot continue. If it is no longer to be responsible and accountable for issuing definitive guidance, I regret to say that that amounts to a death sentence.

19:15

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps I may first pay tribute to Baroness Newlove. She brought to the office of Victims’ Commissioner an enormous energy, and she will be greatly missed.

Secondly, I follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, in declaring my interest as a president of the Sentencing Council. I also declare my interest in having been appointed by the Government of Wales to chair a Commission on Justice in Wales for the people of Wales. I have also contributed to one or two bits of work, as has already been said this evening, in relation to the issues in the Bill.

I welcome the Bill, but we must see it in its context. We really need a reappraisal of our whole sentencing system, as so many people have said, but we cannot get there in one step. So, the Bill should be seen as a step. We need to look at why we are now imposing sentences that are vastly greater than those handed down by the tough old judges I remember 30 years ago. They were thought to be very tough, but these days they would be plastered over the popular newspapers as softies. Why have we done this? That is a question we should ask ourselves. But, more importantly, we should ask ourselves about the consequences, which are that there are not the resources in the prisons to do what they should be doing, and nor are there in the Probation Service, which will now have a great deal more to do. We must see this in context. I welcome it. I pay tribute to the Minister for bringing it forward, and to David Gauke for the tremendous amount of work he has done.

There is much to be welcomed. The provisions in respect of deferred and suspended sentences will enable the Sentencing Council, which I hope will be given its independence to continue, and the judiciary, to develop deferred sentencing and get suspended sentences right. I also welcome the reality of trying to make the public understand that community orders are a punishment. If we do not get that right, there is a real risk that judges and magistrates will suspend sentences of under 12 months. Of course, a suspended sentence increases the risk of incarceration if subsequent offences are committed. This is a very important consideration, which experience has shown we must not overlook.

Having said that, there are one or two observations I will make in more general terms, judged by two principles. The first is that sentencing is part of a system of justice, and we must show that the Bill is a just Bill. Secondly, I want to address the question of practicality and resources.

The first question that relates to the justice of the Bill obviously relates to IPPs. I pay tribute to the Minister for what he has done to try to invigorate the action plan. But the action plan will not achieve justice and remedy an injustice in a period that is just.

There are four short points, in the light of everything that has been said, that I would like to make. First, this sentence has been accepted to be wrong in principle. How can we, as a nation, continue to punish people under a sentence that is wrong in principle? There is no justification for that.

Secondly, there is a misunderstanding about this sentence. People who write about it now simply do not understand what it did and how it worked. It was not a sentence that punished serious violent or serious sexual offending. If we look back at the tariffs that were given, we find that they are of the order, in some cases, of 16 or 18 months. It is absurd to say that these are serious offences—look at the tariff. It is also a misunderstanding of the circumstances in which it came to be imposed.

Thirdly, it is now required that those who are subject to a punishment that we accept is wrong are effectively required to prove that they are not dangerous, but people who committed exactly the same offences before 2005 or who were sentenced after 2012 do not have to prove that. How can that be just? It fails on that score.

Finally, there is the responsibility of the department in continuing this sentence in a means that has made those who languish in prison without knowing when they are to be released more dangerous. That is the responsibility of the Government, and they should acknowledge that. I look forward to and hope we will see cross-party dialogue on this matter, because we must find a solution.

There are three other short points I wish briefly to make on the question of justice. First, the system of earned progression and the way in which punishments are to be added to must be subject to detailed study and detailed dissemination before we pass the Bill. It must be just and be seen to be just. Secondly, it is important that we think again about deporting offenders without them being punished. We do not want this to become a nation where people can shoplift for nothing or, worse still, commit serious crimes and return—courtesy of taxpayer-funded travel, of course—without any consequence.

Thirdly, so much has been said about the Sentencing Council. I do not wish to add anything to that. I was present when it was all negotiated. It was a carefully constructed balance of the power of Parliament, the power of Ministers, and the duties and responsibilities of judges. Getting the constitutional balance right was achieved. We should not upset it because of an unfortunate incident about which least said, soonest mended. Let us just give this up. Those are the points I wanted to make about judging this Bill by reference to justice.

I shall make three other quick points relating to the other principle: does it produce and reflect the realities? First, it seems that we must look at IPPs through the reality of resources. They are taking up room in prison, and probation officer time. We need to adjust and look at the costs of that quite separately from the priceless attributes of justice. Secondly, we must be sure that there is adequate funding for what is to be done. That point has been very strongly made, and there is no point in me repeating it.

Thirdly, I shall say something about Wales. I fear, at times, that we are back in the 19th century and the famous entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica about Wales: “See England”. However, Wales is different, in the form of the way all other home affairs, other than, for example, probation and other aspects of justice, are dealt with. There is a different system. It was the position of the previous Government, and it now appears to be the position of this Government, that they cannot give consideration to what the commission I chaired recommended, which the Welsh Government were happy with, in respect of probation—there were a whole lot of others, but I want to concentrate on probation. Why can they not devolve probation? I want to raise this issue. It seems an important one, and I would like to know why the Government will not give Wales the benefit of what England has. I welcome the Bill, but there are things we must do to put it right.

19:25

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the tributes made to the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. Our thoughts are with her family today.

This Bill is important. The UK has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe and one of the highest rates of reoffending. People in our prisons are not typical of people in Britain. They are more likely to have grown up in a family facing financial hardship, more likely to have poor literacy and numeracy skills, and more likely not to have a job. They are more likely to have been homeless or in unstable housing, more likely to have suffered from a mental health issue, more likely to have had a drug or alcohol addiction problem, and more likely to have suffered childhood abuse or trauma. These are the differences before they enter prison.

There are some amazing people and some amazing organisations, some of which have already been mentioned, working to help people address some of these situational factors that increase the likelihood of people offending again. Programmes such as StandOut, Clean Slate Solutions and Recruitment Junction all help transform people’s lives and stand as examples of what can be done. These programmes, although significant for the lives they have turned around, are still the exception rather than the norm.

David Gauke’s review into sentencing rightly made three points that I particularly want to draw out. First, focusing on rehabilitation and moving to greater use of community sentences could, in some instances, be a way of reducing reoffending. There is significant evidence, as has been mentioned, that short custodial sentences in particular often do more to increase the chances of reoffending, for all the obvious reasons, such as cutting people off from social ties, exposing them to more serious offenders and placing a stigma around them. Secondly, efficiency matters, and we should prioritise focusing expensive prison places on those most serious offenders who pose the greatest risk to public safety. Thirdly, importantly, he points out:

“The overwhelming consensus from the evidence the Review has gathered is that rehabilitative support in the community is, in many cases, the most effective way to reduce reoffending. This relates to the services offenders are required to engage with when serving a sentence in the community or released into the community on licence, following a custodial sentence”.


In theory, the Bill seeks to address these points. I am concerned, though, that good intentions are not enough. The Bill’s provisions and the government policies that sit alongside them need to go further in establishing the adequacy of supervision, providing accountability and, crucially, as has been mentioned numerous times, guaranteeing resourcing if they are to make any real difference to reoffending and not simply make the problem worse.

I would be grateful if the Minister could specifically address the following points, which pick up on these themes that have been raised many times now. First, the Bill relies heavily on electronic monitoring working, yet this is an area that historically has been rife with problems. What guarantees can he make that there will be a step change in monitoring to ensure its adequacy? Will he consider what further provisions can be set out in the Bill to address this point?

Secondly, Clinks estimates that there are close to 2,000 community and voluntary organisations operating in the criminal justice sector. Scaling the capacity of these organisations will be crucial to delivering the reduction in reoffending the Bill seeks to address, yet the Bill says nothing about them. Will the Minister consider introducing a suite of policies to sit alongside the Bill to ensure that voluntary and community organisations engaged in the delivery of community rehabilitation services are adequately supported and resourced to perform their functions under it? This could include policies such as: a move away from short-term contracting towards multiyear unrestricted grant funding; as has been mentioned earlier; a rebalancing away from national commissioning to regional commissioning; and greater use of co-commissioning, where funds can be pooled between departments. Will he also consider what measures could be included in the Bill to hold the Government accountable for the adequacy of resourcing to the sector?

Thirdly, on assessment and accountability, sentences are an area that would benefit from a more evidence-based approach, as has been discussed. It is vital that resources are focused on measures that are most effective at reducing reoffending. Will the Minister consider what more can be done, either within the Bill or alongside it, to ensure that robust assessment is made of the effect of different combinations of requirements on reducing reoffending? Will he commit that this assessment and any associated reporting mechanism will then have an impact on how future resources in the system are allocated?

Lastly, on resourcing, the Bill is intended in part to reduce reoffending. To do so, it will need to dramatically transform the level of support that offenders are given to turn their lives around, tackling entrenched and multifaceted practical challenges, from addiction to poor literacy. As the Institute for Government notes, the Bill shifts the weight of responsibility for much more of this into the community. The Minister has committed that, alongside the Bill, £700 million will be deployed into the Probation Service over the spending review period, yet no detailed breakdown of how the £700 million will be spent has been published. What reassurances can he give that that amount will be adequate? Will he commit to publishing a breakdown of how the money will be spent?

To reiterate, the objectives of the Bill as they relate to reducing reoffending are welcome, but neither its specific provisions nor the policy and commitments that sit alongside it go far enough in explaining or guaranteeing how this greater focus on transformation in the community will happen. I urge the Government to consider how they can strengthen the Bill and associated policies to ensure that there is proper accountability, reporting and adequate resourcing to prevent the measures contained in it making a difficult situation worse.

19:32

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to Baroness Newlove. I had the privilege of working alongside her when I was the Children’s Commissioner and she was the Victims’ Commissioner. It is a hugely sad loss, and she was a fantastic advocate. My thoughts are with her family.

I welcome and support the Bill, and I thank my noble friend for his leadership in bringing it to us. However, the changes it is making are designed for the adult system; as it stands, children and young people are excluded from these positive changes and will potentially have to spend longer in custody, with poorer results. That is what often seems to happen, and it is an example of the way that the rights of children in custody can often appear to be sidelined in a way that is less likely in the adult secure estate. While not included in the Bill, reform of the youth justice system is urgent for both the young people involved and wider society. My remarks today are about the changes that are not included but are needed.

The starting point is that there have been huge gains in the state of youth justice in this country over recent years. We should be pleased that the number of children in custody has been falling for many years; there are now—although it is of course still too many—fewer than 500 young people in custody. So let us do all that we can to make those numbers continue to come down, and to make sure that children in custody are supported to leave with options and opportunities and do not end up reoffending.

While there are now fewer children in the secure estate than there were, those who receive a custodial sentence are almost always in prison for very serious crimes of violence or harm. We need to look at why they got there, how it came about, what went wrong and whether we could have prevented it—and the answer is almost always yes, we could. When I have met young people in the secure estate, many have told me about the missed opportunities that could have diverted them from becoming involved in crime or serious violence. They talk about the experiences that made them particularly vulnerable to exploitation and put them at a higher risk of harm, and many have similar stories to tell. Over three-quarters of children in youth custody were persistently or severely absent from school, and more than half of those were out of education at least one academic year before moving into the secure estate; one-quarter of children in youth custody had been permanently excluded while at school; and over one-third of all children in custody grew up in the 10 poorest areas of the country. The signs and alarm bells are all there.

Neurodivergent children excluded from mainstream school are disproportionately likely to be in custodial settings. Looked-after children have long been overrepresented in the youth justice system, with more than half of looked-after children born in 1994 receiving a criminal conviction by the age of 24, compared to just 13% for those who had not been in care—that is 52%, a number that we should really take note of. Often, those young people are not getting the advice, support or conditions that can support them to thrive and to rehabilitate. The Covid pandemic revealed a system that is frequently not child centred, with children spending very little time out of their cells and having in-person visits stopped, and children in custody not included on the vulnerable list to be eligible for face-to-face education.

When I was Children’s Commissioner, I saw how the justice system so often focuses on adults, with young people seeming to be bolted on as an afterthought. I found that, at every stage of a child’s journey through the criminal justice system, opportunities were missed to get to the root causes of offending and to put children’s best interests at the heart of the response. We need to improve that significantly, and we should be ambitious and impatient for that reform.

There is much to do on reducing the numbers of children on remand. Nearly half of children held in custody are on remand, a figure that has doubled over the last 10 years, yet almost two-thirds of them do not subsequently go on to receive a custodial sentence. Urgent reform is also needed to the YOI system to rehabilitate, educate and reintegrate. One in three go on to reoffend, with reoffenders committing four further offences on average—the highest rate in 10 years—and the costs to the taxpayer and new victims of crime are of course high. I know that my noble friend, Minister MacAlister at the DfE and Minister Richards at the MoJ want to do everything they can to drive down these numbers, and I will support them however I can.

I hope the fact that young people are not included in the Bill means there will be other opportunities to push forward on the reforms that are urgently needed in the youth justice system across prevention, remand and rehabilitation. Otherwise, there is a risk that children will be placed at an even greater disadvantage. There are parts of the Bill that could provide springboards for reforming the youth justice system if applied. For example, the new progression measures allowing people to be released after serving one-third of their sentence if they refrain from poor behaviour should be applied. There is no reason why a child should serve more of the same sentence than an adult.

Any future measures for the youth justice system should focus on rebalancing resources from crisis to intervention; a clear plan to tackle the cumulative impact of racial inequalities—the problems set out so succinctly by the current Lord Chancellor in the Lammy review still exist and still demand action; a comprehensive, long-term strategy for keeping children safe and ensuring that custody is a last resort and that, when children are in the secure estate, their rights and dignity are not forgotten; and a greater focus on preventing reoffending through boosting skills and education in the secure estate. We cannot expect young people who have committed serious crimes to slot back into society without supporting them to succeed and tackling the root causes of their actions. After all, we are a country that believes in holding people to account for their actions while providing most with a second chance and the possibility to thrive and to be active citizens who contribute to society again. Let us not miss the opportunity to do so for those young people in the youth justice system.

19:39

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, I largely welcome what the Government are attempting with this Bill. I wish the Minister involved all the luck in the world, because this is a tough nut to crack. I believe he approaches it from the right point of view, with real passion, understanding and a focus on rehabilitation. When I come to my comments, I need him to take them in that spirit. I associate myself with the comments made about Baroness Newlove; she will be sorely missed. She was warm and welcoming, and a champion for the victim.

Before I go into my comments, I want to address some sentiments that I am picking up in the Chamber today. I have been in youth and community work for over 35 years now, and there seems to be a notion that criminals are victims. I caution the Minister about talking to communities, particularly poor communities, as if criminals are victims, because a poor community will have had all the challenges that those criminals have had but displayed none of that behaviour. If he is at home asking himself, “Why are the public so mean when it comes to rehabilitation or punishment?”, it is for the poor communities. They have had all those troubles and behaved the way they did—properly—but do not seem to be receiving the same support as criminals. I just want him to bear that in mind; it is very important.

My own youth and community work focused for a long time on gang work, which is why I say that we really need a strategy on tagging or electronic monitoring, whatever you want to call it. When you talk about county lines, tagging could be a vital tool in keeping some young children safe. Many years ago, I joined my local gang to break it up, and I wore a tag to see what that experience was like. I showed it to the young people who I was with, and they scattered. Then one 13 year-old boy came back to me in the morning and said something so profound that I have never forgotten it. He said: “Crime needs privacy; the tag breaks that privacy”. We really should look at using that tactic, but it has to have some kind of meaningful plan behind it. We cannot just give them out like Smarties.

We have talked about the acceptance of community orders et cetera. There are three sets of people who need to accept them: yes, the public and, yes, parliamentarians and the system, but also the criminals. The single biggest driver of crime is the idea that you have got away with it. If community orders are seen as a soft touch, they can be used as a recruitment tool. I can imagine a conversation where my local recruiter—I will not the colloquial term; it is not polite language—says to young people, “You’re only going to get a community sentence, so don’t worry about it”. It is very important to make sure that criminals see it as an imposition, not just to make the luvvies in comfortable parts of the country feel good about it.

Before I go on to some other comments, I want to say one more thing about responsibility. I have worked with children who have done some of the most heinous things possible for a person. I have also worked with children, in larger number by far, who have been involved in what I would call anti-social behaviour. The key thing missing from that conversation, not just for children but particularly for adults, is “responsibility”. In the Minister’s own work, he and his family have given people an opportunity to take responsibility. That has to be part of the conversation we have with people, particularly repeat offenders, about their own behaviour. They are acting irresponsibly, against their own best wishes and against their community. If that is not part of the conversation, we will never convince the public that we are doing the right thing by trying to rehabilitate people and not just punish them.

Regrettably, here in London we have had a huge rise in crime. Overall, the Met Police’s recording of crime has gone up by almost a third. Knife crime, which I have seen blighting communities—black and white, rich and poor—because of the fear it generates, has gone up by 86% in the capital. Something needs to be done about that. Only 5% of robberies were solved in the capital last year, which generates the idea that lawlessness is what is happening on our streets. That must be nipped in the bud.

I want to talk about tool theft. The theft of tools and expensive farm gear is very important because if you come from a community that is striving, when tools are stolen it sends the idea that those who are trying are fools while those who commit crime are on to something. That is why it is important that tool theft, in particular, and farm equipment theft are really drilled down on. It sends a message about striving, because the antidote to poverty is not welfare but work. The idea that people in your community are trying to work is very important.

I want to talk about shoplifting as well. What shoplifting is doing to communities is sending the idea that there is no consequence from it; you will speak to people who will tell you that. Shop owners have no confidence that the police have the resources or the desire to go after shoplifters. Customer theft losses in this country topped £2.2 billion last year, which is a record amount and has a ripple effect not only for our businesses but in communities.

That is compounded by the effective decriminalisation of shoplifting through this imminent Sentencing Bill, in which short sentences will, in effect, be banned. Technically, that might be incorrect, but I tell the House that on the street, that is how it is read. I have great sympathy for what the Minister is trying to do with short sentences. I dealt with many young people who went to prison; it was basically a college of crime, so they came back with a much better idea of it than the one they left with. But what is the consequence for low-level crime and for shoplifting? That really has to be brought home to the public. I go back to my theme: if we are to convince the public that rehabilitation and dealing with crime in the community are worthwhile things to pursue, things such as shoplifting will have to seem as if they have some kind of consequence. I ask the Minister again: what is the consequence? How will we tell the public that there is a consequence for what many people consider a low-level crime?

The release of criminals part-way through their sentences also poses a significant threat to society. After just over a year, this Government have freed 26,000 criminals. Where are they? Whose houses are they living in? What effect are they having on people’s communities? I do not see them in the new place where I live, but what effect are they having where I come from? We cannot just push these people out into communities. They might not be your communities, but they are mine. It sends the notion that crime is something people have got away with, or that they can commit more crime. We have to look at the effect of putting those people into particular communities. If we were releasing them into Belgravia, that would be one thing—but that is not where we are releasing them to.

The Government’s own impact assessment says that the Bill will reduce demand for prison places by only 7,500. I know that is not a big figure, and I welcome any reduction, but if we are to say to the public that the motivation for the Bill is that we want to reduce demand for prison places, we will have lost before we begin. We need to say to them that the motivation for it is to reduce crime on the street, to make them safer and to cut reoffending—not to free up prison places, because that simply does not wash. If you doubt me, go to your local chip shop or pub and have a conversation. When you bring that up, see what the response is.

In response to the Bill the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, my late noble friend Lady Newlove made this statement:

“Continual adjustments to sentences through emergency release schemes have eroded public confidence … any new sentencing framework must deliver … above all, public safety”.


I agree with that analysis and so will the public. Please can the Minister tell us how he will display to the public that this is a worthwhile thing to pursue?

The other problem, of course, is about the confidence of our police services to carry out their job. Many police officers feel that they are under a witch-hunt and that if they use the powers they have, they will end up losing their job. That is devastating for poor communities, who need the police to act with confidence to keep them safe. That is very important. We are about to lose 1,300 officers across the country; here in London, we are about to lose 2,000 police officers and police staff. That could have a detrimental effect on the Metropolitan Police’s ability to police the capital. It is important that the Bill addresses issues around the finances and resources that the police have just to carry this out in the first place.

I end on this notion—I want to go back to it for the Minister. The single biggest driver of crime is the idea that people will get away with it. Whatever we decide in this House, we must send a strong message that they are not getting away with it. We are rehabilitating the system that deals with them, but they are not getting away with it. If the Government miss that trick, we will just be right back to where we were in the beginning.

19:49

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, and I join others in the House in paying tribute to Baroness Newlove. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, I was very taken with my noble and learned friend Lord Burnett of Maldon saying that lengthening sentences does not necessarily improve reoffending. It is quite an interesting thought.

I am not a lawyer, rather like the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, but I have retained an interest in sentencing and imprisonment following many years as a trustee of the Koestler Trust, which puts arts into prisons. The whole purpose of this is to give prisoners access to self-expression through the arts and music, which in turn enables a degree of hope. Hope is a very important word to which I will return.

There are two matters that I would particularly like to address. The first is IPP—perhaps not surprisingly, given what I have just said. In some cases, this simply precludes hope. Although the Minister is making no changes to IPP in this Bill, I am nevertheless very grateful to him for his attention to this, and I detect a genuine concern and a desire to improve the situation. That is as it should be. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, referred to the late and much-missed Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood; we need to sit up and take note when such a legal expert as he was is moved to declare IPP as the single greatest stain on the British judicial system.

As we have heard, the Howard League recommended a change in Parole Board practice so that it sets a definite date for the release of each prisoner within a two-year window, and then specifies what the prisoner must accomplish, with professional support, to achieve that. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, convincingly advocated for a resentencing policy to which I was greatly attracted, and still am.

The IPP sentence was introduced by the former Labour Government in 2003, supposedly to protect the public from dangerous offenders. It was, in effect, a life sentence for those who have not committed serious offences, such as murder, that would usually attract a life sentence. The sentence was abolished by the former coalition Government in 2012, but the abolition did not apply to those who were already serving the sentence. Over a decade after its abolition, some 2,422 prisoners are still shamefully languishing in custody under the sentence.

Dr Alice Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has described the IPP as an “inhumane” punishment that

“often amounts to psychological torture”.

If noble Lords feel that is an overdramatic description, I invite them to imagine themselves in the same position: behind bars, unable to make progress, with no hope of getting out. That is an intolerable situation.

I turn to joint enterprise, which has not really been mentioned in the Bill but which I and many others think should be. There has been growing alarm over Crown Prosecution Service data, from organisations such as Liberty, showing that black people are disproportionately prosecuted under joint enterprise, and that a 2016 Supreme Court ruling that the law had been wrongly implemented for more than 30 years has had “no discernible impact” on the number of prosecutions. In her report, Nisha Waller said:

“Joint enterprise is unjustifiably vague and wide in scope. Law reform will not eradicate institutional racism and broader issues with police and prosecution practice. However, the current law encourages the overcharging of suspects and allows cases to be propelled forward based on poor quality evidence. Prosecutors are then left to fill the gaps with speculative case theories and often racialised narratives from which juries are invited to infer joint responsibility”.


I am sure we can all imagine a young boy, under the influence and maybe in fear of older peers, feeling he must follow his comrades without fully realising the implications of what is happening. I would be very interested to know whether the Minister feels that there is equality proportionate to culpability in cases of joint enterprise. Should this not form part of the Bill?

Finally, I am very sympathetic to those who have argued that prisoners convicted of domestic abuse or stalking, and who have been recalled, will not have thrown off that obsessive behaviour after 56 days. That is a really important point.

19:55

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, I start by expressing my sadness—along with that of so many others in the House—at the death of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, whose heartfelt commitment to and hard work for victims have been quite outstanding. I also thank the Minister for his opening, and his work on this Bill. It is a tribute to him that—with the enlightened and evidence-based backing of David Gauke and his team—he has had the courage to champion and introduce these reforms to sentencing, aimed at reducing reoffending.

The urgency of this Bill had indeed flowed from the prison-capacity crisis, which this Government inherited from the Conservative Government—whose responsibility, I am bound to say, was surprisingly not acknowledged by the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, in his criticisms of the Bill and his call for severity. The reality is that we imprison far too many people in this country, for far too long: many more than many other western European nations. There is no evidence of a reduction in reoffending rates as a result. As analysed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, we have persisted in increasing sentence lengths by legislating both for longer overall sentences and for longer periods served, but also by a general sentence inflation, possibly in response to political, public and media pressure.

The noble Lords, Lord Bach and Lord Carter, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, captured this well in their critique of the regrettable toughness contest between political parties. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, put it into historical context with his story of severe judges of the past now being seen as “softies”. The number of remand prisoners has increased, as the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, pointed out, and we have recently seen a record number of prisoners recalled for breach-of-release conditions: some 15% higher in the second quarter of this year than in the same quarter last year. The reality is that prison often does far more harm than good, and that is particularly true of short sentences. Where we can, we should be relying instead on effective and well-resourced community sentences, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester argued in her principled speech, supported in large part by the noble Lord, Lord Hastings.

Many of our prisons have been bad at rehabilitation: underresourced, overcrowded and understaffed, with the toxic cocktail of failings rehearsed today and regularly in previous debates in this House, including too many prisoners in cells filled beyond capacity; prisoners locked in their cells, often for 22 to 23 hours per day, with very little purposeful activity. There is a shortage of vocational and educational training, and too few staff to manage the courses there are. An epidemic of drug abuse is fuelled by widespread drug trading often, sadly, involving corrupt staff. Prisoners, adults and young people, with serious mental health and addiction issues—as well as the literacy, educational and social difficulties discussed by the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield—find that those issues are all going unaddressed.

There is also appalling violence within our prisons. In June, the MoJ and Prison Service reported increases of 11% in assaults by prisoners on other prisoners and of 13% in assaults on staff over the last year alone, attributed in their report directly to overcrowding. There are persistently squalid conditions in many prisons with inadequate, cancelled or deferred maintenance programmes.

As my noble friend Lord Beith said, the criticisms we make do not apply to all prisons. Many of our prisons are of high quality, innovative and motivational, but a successful Prison Service would ensure that all institutions met those standards. In spite of all this, I accept the Minister’s overall characterisation of the commitment and performance of prison staff as incredible. But against a history and background of low morale, there are still too many who fall badly short of that characterisation, and their wrongdoing needs to be exposed and tackled.

The Bill recognises that reducing reoffending depends crucially on rehabilitation and on the Probation Service. It is worth remembering the massive cost of reoffending, estimated to account for more than half of the overall costs of crime in the UK—an annual cost of between £18 billion and more than £23 billion, even without the costs to the state of housing and social care for the families of offenders.

Central to the success of the Bill and the Government in their aims will be resourcing the Probation Service. The Government plan, as we have heard, to recruit 13,000 more probation officers by March next year and are allocating an additional £700 million to the Probation Service by 2028. However, we are seriously concerned that these figures do not add up, as my noble friend Lord Foster explained in detail—the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and others expressed the same doubts. Do the figures take into account three areas of extra costs arising from this Bill: more tagging; implementation of the presumption against immediate short sentences: and extra supervision of early releases on the earned progression model?

We welcome the presumption against short sentences. We have been calling for this for many years in the light of consistent evidence that such sentences increase rather than reduce reoffending. It is to be hoped that supervision of suspended sentences, together with conditions such as treatment conditions imposed by the courts, will lead to a targeted approach to rehabilitation and to addressing the individual difficulties of offenders in achieving rehabilitation within their communities, as described by the noble Baroness, Lady Porter. Suspension of sentences for three years rather than two should assist in this process. However, more suspended sentences should not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, argued, reduce the making of community orders where prison sentences are not warranted.

We also welcome the introduction of the earned progression model recommended by the Gauke review for standard determinate sentences. We recognise the perhaps surprisingly beneficial influence of the Texas model. This represents a logical, sensible and, above all, transparent approach to early release to replace the emergency and indiscriminate SDS40 arrangement. But, for the new system to work well and fairly, training and education in prison must be made more universally available. We would argue that there should be better rehabilitative programmes for prisoners on remand, as well as for sentenced prisoners, and we will introduce an amendment to that effect.

The introduction of a recorded finding of domestic abuse in the sentencing of a relevant offender is a reform for which my honourable friend Josh Babarinde campaigned in the House of Commons. This should enable victims and subsequent partners of domestic abusers to be better protected from past perpetrators. We also applaud the overdue recognition of the interests of victims as a factor in the purposes of sentencing.

On the question of the Sentencing Council, we fully agree with points widely made by my noble friend Lord Beith, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, and others. We regard the Sentencing Council as performing a valuable and independent function in providing advice to sentencers. Nor do we see the Sentencing Council’s work as undermining the constitutional role of Parliament in sentencing policy, as the Bill and this debate so clearly demonstrate. We will seek to amend the proposal in Clause 19 to subject sentencing guidelines to a veto by the Lord Chief Justice—or Lady Chief Justice—and the Lord Chancellor, which is an unwarranted restriction on the independence of the Sentencing Council.

We have specific concerns about the recall provisions in Clause 29. Effectively, the Bill would introduce an automatic recall of 56 days for most prisoners recalled to prison. For less serious breaches, 56 days is a long time. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, pointed out, such recalls may cost offenders their accommodation or places on treatment programmes or the like. We will seek to amend this.

My noble friend Lord Beith mentioned our regret that the Bill does not commit to a resentencing of IPP prisoners. I agree with the tenor of speeches on IPPs from the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, the noble Lords, Lord Moylan, Lord Woodley and Lord Berkeley of Knighton, the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean, and others. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, made the point of principle, and he added an important point on the cost of IPPs.

We also reject the notion of publicly shaming offenders undertaking unpaid work with names and photographs. It is vindictive and unhelpful—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hastings.

Overall, the Bill is overdue in putting rehabilitation and reform first, respecting the evidence on what works in reducing crime. Along with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and others, we reject the Conservative Front Bench’s characterisation of these reforms as likely to increase crime and make the streets less safe. We stress, however, along with all those who have insisted in this debate, that the Bill’s success depends on providing the Probation Service with the support, personnel and resources that it needs. Ultimately, the potential savings to the public purse in reducing the cost of reoffending and the burgeoning costs of the Prison Service could, if realised, bring great net benefit to society, financial as well as social.

20:07

[Lord Keen of Elie (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by paying my tribute to the late Baroness Newlove, not only for her contribution to this House but for the considerable work she did as Victims’ Commissioner. I also thank the Minister for his introduction of the Bill, and all noble Lords for the detailed, informed and sometimes diverse opinions that they have expressed.

The importance of this debate is underlined by the fact that the Bill received so little scrutiny in the other place. It was in Committee for one day. For a Bill so substantial and with such wide ramifications, that seems wholly inadequate. Indeed, it meant that many of the radical changes proposed in it were never even mentioned in the other place, let alone discussed or debated. It is essential that we have the opportunity to examine the Bill carefully and, in some respects, forensically.

I will make a number of general observations. Is this simply an attempt to tackle overcrowding in our prison estate? I certainly hope not, yet there was no mandate for these reforms in Labour’s manifesto. There was a reference to sentencing:

“Even when criminals are found guilty, the sentences they receive often do not make sense either to victims or the wider public”.


Will this Bill improve the complexity but not the comprehension of sentencing? I fear that might be the case. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, observed, the public must be able to comprehend that disposals such as community sentences are not only effective but a form of punishment. It will be important to explain that early release is in the public interest and not just a fiscal necessity. How is that to be done?

As a matter of generality, I also have a degree of concern about the clarity of the proposed reforms and powers that are to be implemented. I make particular reference to Clauses 13 to 16 and Clause 24, which introduce powers for the courts to forbid offenders to enter drinking establishments and attend sports and other public events, as well as to inhibit them from driving and even from leaving specified geographical areas. It is simply not clear in the Bill how any or all these measures would be implemented or enforced. A number of questions arise. How is that to be done? Where will the funding come from? On whose shoulders will enforcement lie? Will it be the responsibility of public houses and those in control of sporting and other public venues? Will they be required to ensure that their own customers are not under court orders? This will require meaningful and effective reform, and, in turn, it will require a meaningful and effective debate so that we can understand how these provisions will work in practice.

Then there is the role of the courts. The Bill leaves the Government’s stance on this somewhat unclear. Clauses 11 and 12 deal with rehabilitation activity requirements. They provide that probation officers, rather than the sentencing courts, will decide on, for example, the number of days of activity in a community order that someone must complete. That means that probation officers will, in effect, replace the courts in the imposition of sentences on those on community orders. That transfers a crucial power, and indeed an important role, from the courts to the Probation Service—a point to which I will return. Again, we require a degree of clarity on that.

Furthermore, the Bill appears to blur the Government’s stance on the relationship between the courts and the Executive, a point addressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett of Maldon, when he referred to the provision in Clause 19 for a statutory requirement for the Sentencing Council to obtain approval from the Lord Chancellor before sentencing guidelines are issued. This implies that the Government believe there should be a close relationship between the Executive and the judiciary on the issue of sentencing, and yet, when concerns were expressed about sentencing for offences such as fly-tipping, shoplifting and knife crime during a recent debate on the Crime and Policing Bill, the Government’s response was:

“sentencing in individual cases is a matter for our independent judiciary”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/4/25; col. 211.]

Is it, and will it be, under the provisions of this Bill? More particularly, how are we to consider the provisions in Clause 18 with respect to the apparent veto? As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett of Maldon, again pointed out, it is somewhat opaque in its provisions.

Turning to some more specific issues, we have the end of short-term custodial sentences and the introduction or development of early release. All of these may, in principle, be attractive, but under Clauses 1 and 2, for example, there will be a presumption that custodial sentences of 12 months or less will be suspended except in limited circumstances, such as breaches of protection orders. Does that mean that, for example, where someone pleads guilty at the first opportunity and gets a remission in their sentence, someone who would have received a sentence of 18 months but is to receive a sentence of 12 months will find themselves with a suspended sentence? In other words, does this presumption apply not only in respect of custodial sentences of 12 months but those up to 18 months? I would welcome the Minister’s response on that.

It is estimated that the implementation of these provisions would mean that about 40,000 criminals would avoid prison entirely. But for what? The purpose of sentencing is not purely punitive but to protect the public from repeat and violent offenders. As many noble Lords observed, rehabilitation and community orders are essentially resource-based. The noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, put the matter very pithily when he said you need the means to achieve the ends. Is the Minister confident that this Bill is going to provide the means to the end? I bear in mind the way in which the Treasury often regards the Ministry of Justice and its role as one of the orphaned children of government; there is a considerable barrier for the Minister to overcome in that respect.

On early release, Clause 20 will reduce it to one-third of the original sentence. I acknowledge that, if we go back to 1967, there were similar provisions in place, albeit that the test was significantly different to the one proposed in this Bill. If we have such early release, how are we going to accommodate the police estimate that this could lead to a 6% increase in overall crime, or approximately an additional 396,000 offences per year, the vast majority of which will involve reoffending by those who have been released from prison?

We are liable to find ourselves in a cycle of release and recall unless we are very careful. The noble Lord, Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, made clear why that cycle can be broken only by effective rehabilitation. Again, I repeat the observation of the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath: you need the means to achieve the ends. Where are the means? Can that be explained?

I am also concerned that the Government’s messaging may be somewhat inconsistent. The Government recently expressed outrage that criminals such as Hadush Kebatu were at large on the streets, and yet, under this Bill, offenders of his type who received a 12-month sentence would be at large on the streets. Could the Government clarify whether they are genuinely committed to including those convicted of such offences in this scheme? It seems that their position is that the community is capable of accommodating such offenders, but it can possibly accommodate them only if effective probation services are in place. Again, it is a case of requiring the means to achieve the ends.

There is also a risk that this Bill simply sends the wrong message to repeat offenders. The presumption against short custodial sentences may appear to have merit, but it removes a vital deterrent to repeat offending, particularly in low-level crimes, anti-social behaviour, theft—particularly retail theft—domestic violence and other cases of stalking and harassment. Such so-called minor crimes are very often the precursors to more serious offending. So short sentences can play an important role as an intervention and a deterrent against that sort of persistent and repeat offending. Has that been properly taken into account when considering the use of non-custodial or suspended sentences in so many of those cases?

There is a risk that we are sending the wrong message to repeat offenders. Indeed, as one noble Lord observed, we may also be sending the wrong message to very young offenders, who may believe that the future holds no risk of imprisonment if they engage in what is regarded as, or what they are persuaded to believe is, low-level criminality.

I suggest that the Bill might involve potential overreach for the Probation Service itself, and will certainly place considerable burdens on that service. Clauses 1 and 2 deal with short custodial sentences being replaced by non-custodial sentences, and Clauses 20 to 23 deal with early release, all of which will increase the burden on the Probation Service. But then Clauses 11 and 12, with respect to rehabilitation, will require probation officers to sentence offenders to the number of days they must complete. Clause 34 will enable probation officers to reduce the amount of unpaid work that an offender must complete.

I will come back to these provisions in a moment, but all these clauses require officers to manage, supervise and monitor a very large number of offenders, who will have avoided custody or have been released early under the Bill. There are, of course, provisions for the probation reset to help or assist the struggling Probation Service, but, when we look at the financial impact assessment, it could at best be described as opaque. We are told that in some instances there will be a modest increase in the cost of services and that the remainder has not been calculated. But probation officers will be expected to take on these new tasks, and a question arises as to whether they will be equipped financially, apart from anything else, to take them on.

But there is also a perhaps more fundamental constitutional issue to be considered here. If probation officers will take on these judicial-type responsibilities, which are being transferred potentially without corresponding investment in training or supervision, where will that lead us? Unlike sentencing decisions taken in open court, these apparently administrative terminations will occur without transparency, oversight or, it would appear, any form of appeal mechanism. The Government have not provided any mechanism to ensure that these decisions are monitored, audited or even transparently reported. I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, about there being room for very material error where you impose these obligations on staff who are potentially underresourced, undertrained and unable to determine with any certainty how they will perform these new functions, which are to be regarded as at least quasi-judicial functions. That represents a major constitutional shift in the balance of responsibility between the judiciary and the Executive. Has the Minister thought that through and considered the operational pressures that this will actually impose on the Probation Service?

Finally, and very briefly—with apologies for being over time—I acknowledge the point about IPP sentences. As a matter of principle, they cannot be maintained. The onus placed on this small cohort is placed on no other prisoner in the prison estate, and they will struggle time and again to overcome it, because we have now reduced that cohort to perhaps the least able to meet the requirements presently placed on them with regard to how they are to be dealt with when they come to seek release. I do not offer a solution to that—I am well aware that the need for a solution has dogged Government after Government—but we cannot wait another eight years to see this play out and I invite the Minister to consider seriously whether this matter should be addressed in the Bill.

20:24

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

My Lords, it is my pleasure to close the Second Reading debate on this vital Bill. I thank noble Lords for their contributions and thank those who have spoken to me privately. I will attempt to answer as many questions as possible, but what I do not cover I will follow up in writing. I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, for his speech. Yes, this Bill is about prison capacity, but it is also about how we can reform the system so it is sustainable, it is affordable and it works, so that we get fewer victims and a real focus on rehabilitation.

I turn first to IPP sentences. I acknowledge that many noble Lords and noble and learned Lords have raised this today, and it is important that their concerns are raised and discussed today. This Government are determined to make further progress towards a safe and sustainable release for those serving IPP sentences—but not in a way that undermines public protection. I put on record my thanks to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, for his work with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, on recall and what we are still learning from that work.

The IPP action plan has contributed to an overall reduction in the IPP population over the last 12 months. As the Prison Reform Trust has said, we are seeing “modest but welcome progress”. For example, the unreleased prison population has reduced by around 14%, to 946 people in September 2025. After three years of quarterly increases, the recalled IPP prison population has fallen in every quarter for the last two years, from 1,652 to 1,476 as of 30 September this year. We have implemented changes to reduce the qualifying period for referral of an IPP sentence to the Parole Board and introduced a provision for automatic licence termination. These changes have reduced the number of people serving IPP sentences in the community by around two-thirds.

The revised action plan, published on 17 July, sets out where we intend to go further, including increasing access to release on temporary licence, expanding the approved premises pilot to improve resettlement support, and enabling swift re-release following recall through risk-assessed recall review when it is safe and appropriate to do so. I am determined to do all we can to support the remaining IPP offenders and their families. I am confident that our efforts will further benefit the IPP cohort. I will continue to engage with noble Lords, and I will continue to focus on developing new ways and improving existing plans to help IPPers have successful parole hearings, and to see fewer IPP recalls. My door is open, and I look forward to our next Peers’ meeting.

I turn to noble Lords’ points on the proposals in the Bill. The earned progression model was raised by the noble and learned Lords, Lord Burnett and Lord Thomas. I must begin by being clear about the context in which the Government have introduced these measures. The prison population is still rising too fast, and we simply cannot build our way out of the capacity crisis. Our new progression model, inspired by Texas and recommended by David Gauke, sets a minimum release point of one-third for those serving standard determinate sentences, which currently have an automatic release of 40% or 50%. For certain sexual and violent offences, the minimum will be 50%. But the most dangerous offenders—those on extended determinate sentences and life sentences—will be unaffected by the measures in the Bill and will remain in prison for as long as they do now. Following the changes in the Bill, there will still be more criminals in prison than ever before.

Under the progression model, if they play by the rules prisoners can earn an early release. If not, they can be locked up for longer—up to the end of their sentence. So if someone receives a six-year standard determinate sentence and they behave badly, they can serve that full six years in prison. Although I have heard the issues raised by noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, it is essential that this model can be implemented quickly and effectively through the established process for punishing bad behaviour and rule breaches in prison.

I was pleased to hear my noble friend Lord Bach welcome the earned progression model, as well as the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and the noble Lord, Lord Carter. I reassure noble Lords that I have spent a lot of time already discussing how the progression model will work. Although it is not an exact mirror of the Texas model, because of the capacity issues and the complexities that it could create, in the prison environment you essentially go up the hill—for bad behaviour, you stay in prison for longer—whereas in probation you go down the hill, so the quicker you do your community service, the quicker you finish your responsibility. We know that this needs to be tough, which is why we are doubling the maximum punishment of added time from 42 to 84 days per incident. The noble Baronesses, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Prashar, rightly brought up the subject of adjudications. Again, that is something that I am looking into; they are right that they need to be absolutely robust and fair.

A number of noble Lords have raised short sentences, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Marks, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and others. It is an important point. We are not abolishing short sentences. Judges will always have the power to send offenders to prison when they have breached a court order, where there is a significant risk of physical or psychological harm to a particular individual, or in exceptional circumstances. However, around 60% of adults sentenced for under a year reoffend within 12 months; a number of noble Lords recited similar facts about the ineffectiveness of short sentences. That is unacceptably high for victims and the public. The evidence shows that those given a community order or suspended sentence reoffend less than similar offenders given a short prison sentence. We are following the evidence to reduce crime, leading to fewer victims and safer communities. I am also following the lead of the previous Government, who introduced this measure in their Sentencing Bill.

I have heard the points raised about the impact of these changes on victims. I reassure noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean of Redditch, that victims are at the heart of this Bill. First and foremost, we fail victims if prisons run out of places entirely and crime goes without punishment. For me, victims must always come first—and we will publish the VAWG strategy shortly. We are imposing tough restriction zones that limit the movement of offenders, instead of limiting the movement of victims, and creating a new domestic abuse flag at sentencing so that domestic abusers are known to prison and probation services and their victims are better protected. We remain steadfast in our commitment to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. In addition to the measures in the Bill, we are continuing the provision of free sentencing remarks to victims of rape and sex offences, and expanding the use of specialist domestic abuse courts, with trained staff to support victims and more co-ordinated management of offenders.

I turn to the points that noble Lords raised about probation capacity and how the reforms in the Bill are being delivered. What is clear from by far the majority of speeches today is that noble Lords are well aware of the pressure on probation but also how powerful it is when you get this right and how fantastic the staff are. That is why I suspect that we will drill deeply in Committee into how the probation proposals work and what we can do to make sure that they are robust. The Probation Service is an indispensable part of the criminal justice system that keeps us safe, but the last decade has been a very challenging time. We have already taken significant steps to focus resources on the highest-risk and prolific offenders, where the evidence shows that probation can have the greatest impact. Earlier this year, we announced a package of measures to rebuild the Probation Service. By the final year of the spending review, our annual £1.6 billion spend on probation and community services will rise by up to £700 million—a 45% increase.

As was clear in the Gauke review, the third sector has a key role to play. We are indebted to so many wonderful organisations that are integral to the work of probation, and I agree that the longer-term funding models are the direction of travel that I would like to see. Although the detailed allocations of that money are to be finalised, I can say that my priorities are clear: more people in post; digital investment that saves time; and tools for probation to use, from increasing tagging to rehabilitation, so that offenders can have a chance to turn their lives around. This will make the job of our probation staff more manageable and more rewarding. I am hopeful for further conversations with noble Lords to give more clarity on probation funding in the days ahead.

Recruitment, retention and training of staff are high priorities for the Probation Service. The right reverend Prelate is clearly aware that we need to ensure that we have sufficient workforce to safely supervise and manage people in the community. This Bill includes several measures, such as welcoming the removal of post-sentence supervision, the introduction of a new probation requirement, and the termination of community orders once an offender has completed their sentence plan. These will streamline processes, enable probation to focus its efforts on those who pose the highest risk, and incentivise offenders to engage with rehabilitation.

The theme of incentivisation is something I feel very passionately about. Having run a business whereby I incentivised colleagues on the front line in shops to serve customers well, I believe—and I see it across the criminal justice system—that not all but many offenders respond to the right incentive at the right time, in their time in prison or on probation. We have gone further since the Bill’s introduction. The Deputy Prime Minister recently announced an expansion of Justice Transcribe, equipping 1,000 more probation officers with the technology that cuts administration and ensures staff can spend more time doing the thing they do best: working with offenders face to face to turn their lives around. We want to go further with this too. Probation staff who have been engaging with Justice Transcribe call it a game-changer and something they have been crying out for for years. It is an important part of our plan to modernise the service. A range of further digital and process improvements will transform the way in which probation staff work, and ensure that they can spend more time doing the things that they love doing.

I am confident that our overall package of investment, continued recruitment and modernisation puts us on a path to ensuring the sustainability of the service for the long term. I will continue to work closely with the Deputy Prime Minister to that end. I would be delighted to meet the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, to talk about a country that is dear to my heart and which I can see from my house: Wales.

I turn to electronic monitoring, which is a crucial means of managing offenders safely in the community. I thank noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Foster and Lord Bailey of Paddington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Porter. The noble Lord, Lord Bailey, may not remember but, many years ago, we met at No. 10, and I would be delighted to carry on the conversation that we had then, which followed the very strong theme of his speech today.

The evidence is clear: tagging works. It provides clear and reliable proof of an individual’s whereabouts and behaviour. A recent study found that curfew tags reduce reoffending by 20% as part of a community sentence. Since their introduction in 2020, alcohol monitoring tags show no tamper and no alcohol consumed on 97% of the days worn as part of a community sentence. Currently, there are around 20,000 people on tags. We will increase this by up to 22,000 across court bail, community sentences and prison leavers, with many subject to curfews and exclusion zones.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Beith, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, the noble Baronesses, Lady Prashar and Lady Chakrabarti, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, raised the Sentencing Council. Judicial independence in making sentencing decisions is a fundamental constitutional principle. The Government have an important duty to secure public confidence in our criminal justice system, and Ministers are responsible for that. It is that balance that we seek to strike in arrangements for the Sentencing Council. We shall return to this in detail in Committee.

The issue of youth sentencing was raised strongly by my noble friend Lady Longfield. There are, and always should be, substantial differences in how children are treated in law compared with adults. The youth sentencing system must strike a right balance between public protection and the principles of justice, while accounting for children’s lesser maturity and protecting their welfare. This is why we will be reviewing the position on youth sentencing separately in the light of the changes that the Bill introduces.

I turn briefly to other points that were raised in the debate. The removal of remand for someone’s own protection does not form part of the remand measures in the Sentencing Bill. As my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti is aware, the Mental Health Bill proposes to end the use of remand for someone’s own protection, where the primary concern is the defendant’s mental health. I am open to hearing more on the general removal of remand for own protection.

The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, raised concerns about Clause 11. The clause does not remove the court’s sentencing powers. It is ultimately up to the court to determine whether to include this requirement when making a suspended sentence order or community order. Probation officers assess each individual’s risks and needs after sentencing. They are currently responsible for determining the volume of supervision required and, as such, are best placed to determine how many rehabilitative activities will be most effective. That is why this clause removes the court’s set activity days. This ensures that resources are used where they have the greatest impact in reducing reoffending and protecting the public.

The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, raised recall. Recall is, and will remain, an important risk management tool to protect the public and victims. We are going further than the review’s recommendations to introduce important safeguards. To protect the public and victims, certain offenders can receive only a standard recall. These offenders will be re-released by the Secretary of State or the Parole Board before the end of their sentence only if they meet the statutory release test.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Beith, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, raised concerns about Clause 35. I am sure that we can agree that people who commit crimes should show that they are giving back to society. I assure noble Lords that careful consideration has been given to how this is implemented and how wider impacts can be mitigated.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, that I am keen to discuss gambling and how we support addiction generally in the community. It is something that I am very passionate about too.

I would be delighted to meet the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton, to discuss joint enterprise with my colleague, Minister Alex Davies-Jones, as it is her area of expertise within the Ministry of Justice.

This has been a wide debate, and I bow to the experience and expertise in the Chamber today. I and my officials will read Hansard carefully and, if I have missed anything in my response, we shall make sure to engage with your Lordships before and after Committee. I look forward to that. I beg to move.

Bill read a second time.

Commitment and Order of Consideration Motion

Moved by

[Lord Timpson]

That the bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House, and that it be an instruction to the Committee of the Whole House that they consider the bill in the following order:

Clause 1, Schedule 1, Clauses 2 to 9, Schedule 2, Clause 10, Schedule 3, Clauses 11 to 27, Schedule 4, Clauses 28 to 31, Schedule 5, Clauses 32 to 47, Title.

Motion agreed.

House adjourned at 8.42 pm.