Home Detention Curfew and Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods (Amendment) Order 2024

Baroness Newlove Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede) (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving this order, I thank members of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for the scrutiny of this statutory instrument. The Government laid this draft order on 13 November. I hope that has given noble Lords an opportunity to scrutinise the order and its accompanying explanatory documents. I welcome this further opportunity today to be clear about what the order will do and the Government’s reasons for taking these measures.

The draft order is a key part of our continuing efforts to resolve the capacity crisis in our prisons. After inheriting from the previous Government a prison system on the verge of collapse, on 12 July the Lord Chancellor was forced to announce a measure to address the immediate risk of running out of prison places. This was a change to modify the automatic release point for those serving standard determinate sentences from 50% to 40%. Specified offences were excluded from this modification. The draft order before us now makes further important changes to that original measure by excluding further offences from this modification.

As part of our continuing efforts to avoid running out of prison spaces, the order amends the provisions relating to the home detention curfew—HDC—by extending the maximum time that an offender can spend on HDC in the community. HDC enables eligible, risk-assessed offenders to be released from prison six months early, subject to an electronically monitored curfew. We are proposing to extend the maximum time that an offender can spend on HDC from six months to 12 months. To be clear, the eligibility and suitability criteria remain the same—for example, sex offenders are still excluded in statute and those serving sentences linked to domestic abuse are presumed unsuitable under the policy.

It is right that the sentencing review is given time to do its work, but the capacity crisis in our prisons has not gone away. When we introduced emergency measures in July, we believed that they had bought us about a year. However, after the summer of disorder, the next crisis could be just nine months away. For that reason, we must implement further measures urgently to ensure that we do not face running out of places again. This change to HDC will help to ensure that the criminal justice system is able to function as it should, helping to prevent further acute capacity pressures and avoid running out of prison places, which would cause criminal justice gridlock.

As to the purpose of this draft order, it relates to release measures within the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The first part of the draft order deals with HDC. HDC has been in operation since 1999. The scheme enables certain prisoners to be released from prison early while remaining subject to significant restrictions on their liberty. Offenders who are released from custody on this basis are tagged and placed on a curfew. This curfew must be for at least nine hours per day, by law, but is generally around 12 hours per day as a matter of policy. The curfew requirement must remain in force until they reach their conditional or automatic release date. Those released on HDC are subject to probation supervision and other restrictions as necessary. These may include GPS location and alcohol monitoring, exclusion zones, non-contact conditions and travel restrictions. If offenders breach the terms of their conditions, they can be recalled to custody to serve the remainder of their custodial sentence.

The rules on eligibility will not change as a result of this draft order. Offenders must complete half of the custodial part of their sentence before they can be considered eligible for HDC. Release on HDC is also entirely discretionary. There are a number of offences that are excluded from its scope by statute—for example, serious violent offences and all sexual offences. Other types of offending are presumed unsuitable as a matter of policy, including those often associated with domestic abuse, such as stalking, harassment and coercive control. Offenders serving sentences for any of the presumed unsuitable offences will not be considered for release unless the prison governor is satisfied that there are exceptional circumstances justifying this. Any offenders who meet this test will still be subject to a rigorous risk- assessment process before release on HDC is approved.

We are proposing to change the maximum period that an eligible prisoner may spend on HDC. We plan to extend it to 12 months from the current maximum of six months. Offenders eligible for HDC will continue to be risk-assessed and will still be subject to strict licence conditions and an electronically monitored curfew. As the previous Prisons Minister stated in February, the reoffending rate for prisoners released directly from custody was close to 50%, but for the types of offenders released on to HDC it was 23%.

The previous Administration committed to doing a review when HDC was extended from four and a half months to six months. That review did not take place, and the growing crisis in our prisons has meant that we need to take further action. HDC is closely monitored by HMPPS and the MoJ, and data on releases and recalls is regularly published. That will continue. I must be clear that this measure is urgently needed to reduce the pressure on the prison system. The challenges facing us across the prison estate are such that we must take urgent action to allow the sentencing review to take place. By extending HDC, we are using a long-standing mechanism that has robust safeguards built into it.

The order will also amend the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods) Order 2024, which established the SDS40 early release measure by modifying the automatic release point for those serving standard determinate sentences for eligible offences from 50% to 40%. The SI seeks to exclude six further offences from the early release measure.

SDS40 was delivered extremely effectively, but there was a problem with 37 prisoners who were released in error. Those offenders had been prosecuted under a repealed law that we had not excluded from SDS40. The Court of Appeal had ruled that we should treat the offenders who had been prosecuted under this offence after it had been repealed as if they had been prosecuted under the new offence, which was already excluded from SDS40. That ultimately meant that those prisoners were not identified as being ineligible for early release under SDS40. All the offenders released in error were returned to custody.

Subsequently, a thorough search uncovered similar anomalies where legislation creating criminal offences has been repealed and replaced. We had already taken the decision to exclude such offending, which relates to stalking, harassment, sexual harm and so-called revenge pornography, from the scope of emergency early release.

We are therefore acting quickly to exclude five further offences from SDS40 to ensure that the spirit of the original exclusions is delivered. This will ensure that anyone convicted of any of these offences cannot be released early under SDS40.

The draft order also excludes murder from SDS40. Anyone convicted of murder in the UK would have received a mandatory life sentence so would not be eligible for release under SDS40. However, some jurisdictions do not have life sentences so it is possible that in a small number of cases a UK national convicted of murder in a foreign jurisdiction may be given a determinate sentence for murder by that foreign court and may then be repatriated to the UK to serve that sentence in a prison in England and Wales. We want to ensure that no offender in this position could be released under SDS40.

Shortly after coming to power, the Government took decisive action to stop our prisons from collapsing. SDS40 was an emergency response to the crisis that we were faced with. We worked at pace to ensure that the scheme was as effective as possible while protecting the public by excluding the most serious offenders and providing specific protections for victims of certain domestic abuse offences.

We have kept SDS40 under constant review and are now acting quickly to address a small number of anomalies in the original legislation. The draft order extends to England and Wales only, and there should be no direct effect on the devolved Administrations. I beg to move.

[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, both as Victims’ Commissioner and a victim going through the criminal justice system, I was horrified to read the NAO report published week which assessed government plans to expand the prison population. The report told us that on current forecasts the population would exceed prison capacity by 12,400 by the end of 2027. It is impossible to see how this can be absorbed by any building programme, let alone one that can be completed in just three years. It leaves the Government in an impossible position of having to explore all alternatives and it is against this backdrop that we find ourselves here today.

I am told that the home detention curfew scheme is hugely effective. Other than in the context of reducing the prison population, I am not sure how this statement can be made. As far as I am aware, there has been no recent evaluation of the scheme, but I would be interested to hear on this point from the Minister. Prison governors are responsible for selecting offenders who are suitable for the scheme. It is to their credit that compliance levels are relatively high. However, can we really be confident that current compliance levels will remain if the scheme is, in effect, doubled in length? Again, I would be interested to hear the Minister’s view.

It will come as no surprise when I say I come to this debate from the perspective of the victim. As I have said before, most victims seek justice, not vengeance. On hearing a sentence being delivered, the victims expect the sentence handed down to be served in full. This is not unreasonable; surely it is what we mean by justice. Victims listen to the remand time that has been deducted from the sentence; they know that part of the sentence will be served on licence, but they struggle to accept a prison sentence being reduced—by up to 12 months—through one or other early release scheme simply to reduce prison population pressures.

I fear that retrospective pruning of sentences by all successive Governments over the years has had a corrosive effect on public confidence in our justice system. How can you trust a justice system if all Governments keep moving the goal posts? It also adds an extra layer of complexity on sentencing and, heaven knows, sentencing is already complicated in the first place.

I make a plea to this Government and future Governments: let this be the very last time we have to extend an early release scheme to bail us out of another prison crisis. We need a sustainable sentencing regime where the sentence handed down is the same as that victims hear and the same as that the offender will serve, and we need a prison system that has the resilience and the means to meet the challenge.

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

My Lords, we support the principle of this order and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, for his helpful introduction and explanation of it. He acknowledged, indeed asserted, that the background to the measure is the capacity crisis of which we have spoken over a number of years under the previous Government. This order is, in essence, the amendment of an emergency measure taken in the face of extreme pressure on the Government as the space in prisons simply ran out.

We recognise the need to extend the time, in the face of the continuing crisis, that may be spent on home detention curfew or HDC. It is significant that the reoffending rates among HDC prisoners are lower than those among the prison population at large on release. We also recognise that, for the technical reasons that the noble Lord has outlined, there need to be changes to the range of offences where eligibility for release under SDS40 is established.

As prisoner numbers have risen, with longer sentences resulting from sentence inflation, from legislation introducing longer sentences and legislation imposing longer periods which have to be served in custody as a proportion of the whole sentence, we have to look at how we deal with this crisis in the future.

While we support the principle of this order and the orders that have preceded it, I will ask the Minister for assurances in two specific areas before making a number of general points. First, it is an essential part of the early release scheme that offenders be tagged and that, when tagged, they are properly monitored within the community. Many were alarmed by the number of reports at the beginning of this scheme of offenders being released without tags. The noble Lord, Lord Timpson, described that as “completely unacceptable”, and we agree. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister details of steps the Government have taken to ensure that nothing like that can happen again. It would also be helpful to hear further details of how well the steps taken to monitor prisoners who are tagged on release are working in practice.