Sentencing Bill

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.

Sentencing Bill

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

The risk of requiring Crown Courts to publish information in only some cases, but not all cases, and to expect the Crown Courts to exercise discretion, is that it could lead to public suspicion that they are suppressing data for precisely the sorts of reasons that the noble Lord articulated earlier: that it might lead to the rise in support for populist parties.

If the concern is that the publication of data showing the number of serious offences committed by people according to country of birth, nationality, ethnicity or immigration status might fuel a rise in populism, then surely the cause would be the fact that a disproportionate number of criminal offences are being committed by members of certain groups, not the fact that that information is being published. The concealment of that information and the refusal to publish it, or the concealment of some of the information, would, I fear, lead to greater public suspicion, speculation and, indeed, misinformation.

The argument made by the chief constables is that the public need to know this information if we are to avoid the kind of speculation and misinformation that fuelled the disorder in the summer of 2024. The famous Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, said the best remedy for false and misleading speech is “not enforced silence” but more and better speech. Sunlight in these cases is the best disinfectant.

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I also support Amendment 93B in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe.

It is well established that the literacy and numeracy rates for those who end up committing crime are much lower than those in the general population. A Ministry of Justice report into prison education found that 57% of adult prisoners taking initial assessments had literacy levels below those expected of an 11 year-old.

In his review, David Gauke explicitly references the use of purposeful activity in the Texan system and positive engagement with it as being linked to serving less time inside prison; yet under these reforms there is no such requirement. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has already referenced Charlie Taylor’s assessment of the current system. David Gauke also points out in his review just how much of a problem access to these services is in many of our prisons:

“His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons’ annual report for 2022-2023 found that standards of purposeful activity were rated poor or insufficiently good in all but one of the adult male prisons inspected”.


Despite the measures in the Bill, there will still be a growing prison population. This will make delivering these services even more challenging, but it has to be addressed. We need to make sure that people who are spending time in prison are spending it as constructively as they can. Focusing on this and prioritising resource to help reduce the chances of people reoffending is the best way of reducing crime over the longer term. I would argue accountability and mandatory requirements are what ultimately drive how we place resources.

[Lord Burnett of Maldon (CB)]

My Lords, I was not intending to intervene at all in this group, but could I just try to inject an element of reality into Amendment 86A, which the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, proposes? It requires the courts service to record and retain, in respect of all offenders convicted and sentenced in the Crown Court and magistrates’ court, the details that have been referred to: country of birth, nationality, ethnicity, immigration status, and the offences themselves.

It is important to remind the Committee that, in the magistrates’ courts, hundreds of thousands of minor offences are dealt with every year. For example, there are hundreds of thousands of motoring offences such as speeding, careless driving, not having insurance and matters of that sort, as well as tens or hundreds of thousands of failures to pay a TV licence. The vast majority of those cases do not trouble a court in the normal sense, in that there is no hearing in a court. They are dealt with under the single justice procedure. Almost all of them, save those that are contested, are dealt with, essentially, on the papers.

The information identified in the proposed amendment is not available at the moment, and it is difficult to see how it might be made available. I cannot, for the moment, think of a way that it could be done without exponentially increasing the burden on the system generally and imposing huge burdens on those who have been prosecuted for speeding or not having a TV licence, and so forth. Unless there were compulsion of some sort for this information to be given, nothing could sensibly happen. I do not seek to express a view on the merits of collecting such information, or at least parts of it, for some cases; that already happens, as in the Crown Court, to some extent. However, the breadth of this amendment travels into the area of unreality, I regret to say.

Sentencing Bill

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome Amendment 148A. The Bill will shape the ecosystems of support that underpin and surround our entire justice system. A recurring theme through Second Reading and Committee so far has been the question of resourcing. While the focus of these discussions has been largely around the Probation Service itself, we cannot ignore the 1,700 community and voluntary organisations that work in this area, both inside and outside prisons.

We know that there are many aspects where community and voluntary organisations excel. There are some dimensions, the evidence shows, where they provide better than private companies or the public sector. They build social capital, enable trust and often have an understanding of vital contextual points related to specific communities or issues. I am sure any of us who have spent any substantial time volunteering and working closely with people in very vulnerable situations understand this dynamic.

In general, this sector in the UK is facing challenges on many fronts. The rise in national insurance, corporate giving stalling and increasing overheads across the board, combined with growing demand, are all contributing to what the National Council for Voluntary Organisations refers to as the year of the “big squeeze”. Clinks’ State of the Sector 2024 report makes for sobering reading, and that is the situation as things stand. If the vision that sits behind the Bill is to stand any chance of success, not only do we need to find a way to support and shore up the existing voluntary and community sector but we need to prioritise expanding its capacity and growing it.

That is more straightforward than it sounds. There is a remarkable level of agreement across organisations such as the Charities Aid Foundation, the Centre for Social Justice, Clinks and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, to name a few, about the kinds of policies that are needed. A lot of these are to do with processes: simplifying, contracting, commissioning locally and more collaboratively, introducing contract indexation and protecting local specialist funding. Others are about finding ways of attracting more private and corporate donations into the sector; for example, making changes to gift aid and introducing matched funding. Others, as the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee report Better Prisons: Less Crime highlighted, are practical points about how HMPPS and individual prisons can co-ordinate better with the third sector.

This amendment by itself is not an answer, but it is a prerequisite for bringing the level of transparency and accountability that is needed into this system. This provides a powerful opportunity, if used correctly. We need to understand in more detail the plan for addressing the impact of the Bill by requiring a formal report on its impact and on the capacity of the voluntary and community sector to meet any increased demand. This amendment will build accountability into the system.

If we fail to monitor the effects of this legislation on the very organisations that underpin rehabilitation and community safety, we risk creating new pressures in the system. By amending the Bill to provide for this assessment, the Government have the opportunity to send a clear signal here, demonstrating that they believe that policy should be informed by data and that the community and voluntary sector is a valued partner. This amendment would strengthen oversight, support the sector and ensure that the promises of the Bill are matched by the capacity of the community to deliver them.

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

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord and the noble and learned Lord for the opportunity to discuss these important issues. I appreciate that these amendments seek to improve transparency and public understanding of the criminal justice system, and this Government agree wholeheartedly on the importance of open justice. However, we do not consider that these amendments are necessary to achieve that aim.

I turn first to Amendment 84. I reassure noble Lords that the Government are taking action to increase the openness and transparency of the system. In certain cases of high public interest, sentencing remarks are already published online, and sentencing remarks can also be filmed by broadcasters, subject to the agreement of the judge. The sentencing of Thomas Cashman for the appalling murder of Olivia Pratt-Korbel was one such example. The Government have recently extended provision of free transcripts of sentencing remarks to victims of rape and other sexual offences whose cases are heard in the Crown Court, and it remains the case that bereaved families of victims of murder, manslaughter and fatal road offences can request judges’ sentencing remarks for free. We are also actively exploring opportunities offered by AI to reduce the costs of producing transcripts in future and to make transcripts across the system more accessible. But this amendment introducing this additional provision of court transcripts would place a significant financial burden on the courts and divert resources away from where they are needed most in the wider system.

The release of any court transcript requires judicial oversight to ensure accuracy and adherence to any reporting restrictions and to make sure that other public interest factors have been considered. This amendment would therefore have significant operational and resource implications for HMCTS and the judiciary. It would place extra demands on judicial capacity in the Crown Court and on HMCTS at a time when the system is under immense pressure, so while we agree entirely on the importance of transparency within the justice system, we cannot accept the amendment at this time. However, I reassure noble Lords that we will continue to consider this closely. In particular, I want to explore what opportunities AI presents to improve transcriptions and data. I am sure that noble Lords agree that the potential is there and that we need to find the best way to harness it. I will write to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on the point around data and accuracy.

I turn to Amendment 85. Again, we agree with the principle of improving transparency but not with the necessity of the amendment itself. This Government are committed to improving the collection and publication of data on foreign national offenders. The Ministry of Justice has already taken action to increase transparency on the data published. Notably, in July, for the first time the offender management statistics included a breakdown of foreign national offenders in prison by sex and offence group. We are also working closely with colleagues in the Home Office to establish earlier identification of foreign national offenders. Being able to verify the nationality of offenders ahead of sentencing will facilitate more timely removals and may also provide an opportunity for enhanced data collection. We will keep this under review as part of our ongoing work to strengthen the data collection and publication system that we inherited from the previous Government.

Implementation of these measures may require a new mechanism to verify the information provided, which must be cost effective and prevent placing additional pressure on operational staff. For this reason, we cannot accept a statutory duty to publish this information before the necessary infrastructure is in place to support it. Our measured approach will continue to support the return of more foreign national offenders while ensuring maximum transparency for the public.

I am grateful to the noble Lord and the noble and learned Lord for Amendment 148A concerning measuring the impact of the Bill on the voluntary and community sectors. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Porter of Fulwood, who has championed this subject during the Bill’s passage. She made a thoughtful and impassioned contribution at Second Reading and in today’s debate. The voluntary and community sector plays a vital role in developing and delivering services to people in our care. The sector supports HMPPS and the MoJ by bridging gaps and providing continuity that reduces reoffending and drives rehabilitation through targeted specialist support. Many of the services we provide would not be possible without the vital contribution of the voluntary sector, including charities such as Women in Prison, the St Giles Trust, PACT and many others. The Independent Sentencing Review made recommendations for where the third sector can be utilised to support the Probation Service and offenders on community sentences or on licence.

We already work closely with third-sector organisations to deliver better outcomes in the criminal justice system. For example, we work in partnership with the charity Clinks through the HMPPS and MoJ infrastructure grant to engage a network of around 1,500 organisations. In collaboration with Clinks, we have convened a series of roundtables with voluntary and community sector representatives and policy colleagues to explore the review’s recommendations and how the sector can make the greatest contribution to probation capacity.

I have carefully considered Amendment 148A. However, it will not be possible to fully understand the impact within 12 months, nor based just on data from the first six months of the Act being in force. Implementation of the Bill’s provisions will be phased over time and closely linked to the outcomes of the Leveson review and its implementation. In addition, the sector’s experience will be influenced by the introduction of new commissioned rehabilitative services contracts. Measuring the impact within such a short timeframe amid these overlapping and confounding factors would be highly complex. But again, I want to explore the opportunities that AI presents to collect and use better data in future. I can assure noble Lords that we will continue to work closely with the sector to ensure that it is considered and utilised in the implementation of this Bill.