Prisons: Imprisonment for Public Protection

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Burt of Solihull]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what further steps they are taking to reduce the size of the Imprisonment for Public Protection prison population following the publication on 15 November of the HMPPS Annual Report on the IPP Sentence.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, first, I apologise for my germy little self. I will try not to infect anybody else.

This is a bittersweet moment for me. It is great to see the measures that we fought for so hard for in the Bill come to fruition, but in my heart I know that it is all based on the faulty premise that all these prisoners could achieve release if they jumped through all the hoops and tried hard enough for long enough. Imagine an engine that was fundamentally flawed in its design, so much so that it was discontinued, and no more parts were made after 2012. For some reason, we are refusing to scrap that faulty engine, and many of the parts that might have worked initially are now falling apart or are irreparably damaged. If we were talking about a real engine, we would scrap it, but we are not talking about a real engine, are we? We are talking about human beings whom we have irreparably damaged by trying to fit them into the maw of a machine that has torn them apart in the process.

The $50,000 question is, if we are not going to do a resentencing exercise, what is the alternative? Further fiddling with a broken system is not going to do it. The prison system is, to extend the engine analogy, running dangerously hot at 97% capacity. Perhaps we should not expect too much until after the sentencing review and the introduction of a culture that is radically different from the “throw away the key” mentality.

I commend everyone who has worked so hard to produce this report, and the people who work tirelessly within the proverbial machine to keep it limping along. The report is seven months late. Even though it was completed in April this year, it was not released until November. Various reasons have been given, but with changes moving apace—we hope—it would be good to know what further progress has been made since April. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, was particularly keen to ask this question had he been able to be here today.

There is a lot of information to digest, but also questions that, with hindsight, I wish I had asked before. On access to and the quality of the courses, I am still getting reports not just that prisoners cannot find the courses they need but that the courses are often not fit for purpose. I have been told that half of prisoners cannot access courses. With the system running at capacity, this is unsurprising, so my first question to the Minister is, what is the average waiting time for each course recommended for each prisoner? What work has been done to assess the effectiveness of these courses?

My next point concerns sex offenders. Four hundred and sixty-five IPP sex offenders have never been released, although some of the initial offences were fairly low level. I know that the Secretary of State before last had a policy of turning down every IPP prisoner sentenced for a sexual offence who had been deemed fit for parole by the Parole Board. Here, the Catch-22 of proving that you are not going to reoffend by doing something you have had no opportunity to do really kicks in. This will not do, but I do not know whether any special measures are being taken to fit sex offenders into whatever passes for acceptability for release. If the answer is obvious, and I did not read the report well enough, perhaps the Minister will write to me and not waste further time.

On reasons for recall, are there any figures available for this? From the report, it seems that the number of recalls has been pretty steady in the past six years or so. I would have hoped that the numbers would have decreased following discussions we have had with the Probation Service, which says that reasons such as turning up late for a probation meeting are now much more tolerantly treated, rather than simply returning IPP prisoners to prison. Is it fair to ask that question now when improvements are promised? Yet individuals and organisations have said that these reasons persist. The mean time on recall has more than doubled since 2015. One would hope that the new focus on IPPs will now cause that figure to drop dramatically.

On reconviction rates, this—of all figures—indicated to me what is wrong with the overly risk-averse approach to the IPP sentence and the treatment of IPP prisoners. Only 0.5% of IPP prisoners released were subsequently convicted of a serious further offence. I do not have access to this figure, so will the Minister say, from the current figures available to him, what percentage of “ordinary” prisoners convicted of a serious further offence were reoffenders? In other words, what percentage of normal prisoners—whatever a “normal” prisoner is—reoffended with a serious offence? I bet my bottom dollar it is more than 0.5%.

Is it not time to abandon this risk-averse approach and to change the culture that blames probation and parole services for failure and congratulate them on all the difficult work that they do? Nobody can get it right all the time, unless we keep every offender in prison—we are doing quite a good job of that at the moment. Do we not need a more realistic, balanced approach, a bit more like the one we give to ordinary prisoners today? The system works, to a degree, and, as far as can be managed without omnipotence, without locking up some people for life on the off chance that they might reoffend. There are prisoners dying of cancer, confined to wheelchairs, who are still serving an IPP sentence. Shall we build a bit of compassion into this wonky, dysfunctional machine of ours or, better still, design something else which is less likely to turn an IPP sentence into an actual life sentence? I welcome the PMB introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, and I will strongly support it when it comes before the House. If not resentencing, we still need an alternative to the dysfunctional system that we have.

I look forward to the contributions of other noble and noble and learned Lords who know a lot more than I do and to the response of the Minister, who is very much put upon to deliver messages that we are not always minded always to hear.