Sentencing Bill

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.