Criminal Justice Reform

Debate between Lord Lemos and Lord Bishop of Gloucester

Tuesday 8th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness. That is exactly what we are thinking about now. As we go forward with these plans on IPPs, we are actively considering how we support them, before release and afterwards. It is absolutely shocking that 80% of the unreleased IPP prisoners—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, mentioned this statistic—have served more than 10 years over their tariff. Of course that has had an effect on them and we must make sure that we understand and mitigate that effect, not just from the point of view of public protection but for the welfare and dignity of those people. I still believe in the welfare and dignity of prisoners; I know that is old-fashioned.

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for this Statement, particularly the highlight on IPP prisoners. However, the approach still feels piecemeal, driven too much by ill-informed public narrative and wrongly focusing the problem on prison capacity. Does the Minister agree that the focus needs to be on reducing offending and reoffending, with the solutions being evidence-led to benefit victims, offenders, families and communities together? Will he say what progress has been made in response to recommendation 5.1 of the Independent Sentencing Review, namely, that we should:

“Launch a public awareness campaign on sentencing”,


because in recent weeks we have seen the consequences of this huge void?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for those observations. I disagree only with the comment about the ill-informed public narrative. There is a need for us to better explain to the public what we are doing and why we are doing it, particularly, as I have said, the intensive community supervision that we are talking about in the second phase of the progression model. The Government are still committed to the progression model; it is in the legislation, and we will take it forward. I absolutely accept the challenge that we need to do better at communicating with the public.