Sentencing Bill

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Lords Chamber

Pre-sentencing reports look at the issues that have perhaps led to the problem and give an opportunity to identify the type of activity that would be most beneficial to the offender to reduce reoffending, and that is important. Broadly, I welcome the thrust of the amendment, but I hope we will also pick up the problems of resources to make sure that it can be carried through, and perhaps we can address that at a later stage in our deliberations.

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 35, as outlined by my noble friend Lord Sandhurst. As I said at Second Reading, good intentions go only so far. The Bill transfers a large part of the responsibility for rehabilitation into the community, a change that, as has been pointed out by many, the evidence supports. Not only does it have benefits for those who would previously have served a short custodial sentence but, in theory, by reducing the number of those in prison over time, it should provide the capacity that is needed to ensure that those in the prison estate are better able to access the education and support services they need to give them a second chance on release.

The challenge, though, is that this Bill places more people out in the community but does not go far enough in answering the question of what support they will be receiving to help address some of the underlying factors driving their offending. Unless this happens, it could make a difficult situation worse. This amendment specifically deals with those on a suspended sentence, obliging them to undertake at least one form of support, such as an apprenticeship.

The proportion of people with a rehabilitation activity requirement attached to their suspended sentence is relatively high at the moment. The challenge is that adequate resourcing for them is often not available and access can be patchy. A Ministry of Justice assessment from earlier this year found that the rehabilitation activity requirement

“tended to be seen by probation staff as the ‘right idea in theory’ but more resource is needed to deliver it appropriately”.

When asked about the biggest barriers that affect how the rehabilitation activity requirement is delivered, responses tended to centre on limited funding and resource. All practitioner participants reported that resource constraints—for example, staffing shortages and time pressures—and practical constraints, such as a lack of meeting rooms, were barriers to the effective delivery of rehabilitation activity requirements.

This matters because, as the Magistrates’ Association pointed out in its submission to the Sentencing review:

“The impact of delays on offender outcomes is clear. One magistrate told us that an offender was given a Mental Health Treatment Requirement … as part of a suspended sentence, yet their first appointment didn’t occur until nearly six months after it was imposed. The offender was not able to access treatment in time and subsequently reoffended. This may not have happened had he been given support earlier”.


If this is happening at the moment, my worry is what will happen when the system is placed under much greater strain through many more people being managed in the community. Although the Government have committed to some additional funding for probation, they have published no detailed breakdown of how this funding will be deployed. They have also not addressed the central role that the many community and voluntary organisations in this sector play as a critical part of the delivery model for this type of activity.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

If I may, I would like to help the noble Baroness with the very powerful argument that she is making, with a set of statistics that I hope noble Lords will find worrying. If we look at the 91,000 people on average who are currently engaged in probation, community sentences and so on, we find that, in 2023, only 1,302 of them even started treatment—that is 1.8%. The shortage of support services is deeply worrying.

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. To build on that, more needs to be done for the community and voluntary organisations that, sitting alongside this Bill, will help build the capacity to deliver, so that the rates he outlined will be increased. Policy examples include multi-year, unrestricted grant funding and regional commissioning.

I return to the amendment. By being more explicit in the Bill about the central role that rehabilitative activity plays, my hope is that the Government would be forced to resource this area sufficiently and signal that they view these services and programmes as essential, rather than discretionary.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the names of my noble friends on the Front Bench. Some 14 years ago, I travelled to San Miguel prison in Santiago, Chile, which was one of the worst prisons in South America. I had the dubious distinction of travelling often with the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, who is a noted prison campaigner. When I travelled with her, she invariably asked me to accompany her to a prison. She would regale me with the greatest hits of the worst prisons in the world. Her choice was Kingston prison, in Jamaica. At San Miguel, in Santiago, we saw the results of a system that was overly concentrating on punitive actions and did nothing on education, training and rehabilitation. In fact, a few weeks before, 81 prisoners had died in a fire following a riot in that prison. Over the course of a few years, I visited the toughest prisons in Honduras and El Salvador. I can tell the Committee that they were not Pontins holiday camp in any respect.

The serious point, our earlier debates notwithstanding, is that if we accept the importance of suspended sentences and the fact that, according to Ministry of Justice figures, incarcerating a person in the prison estate costs £53,801 a year, then the state has an obligation to provide those individuals in the criminal justice system with endemic, underlying problems—drink and drug misuse, poor family background and poor education, skills and training—with an alternative way out of recidivism.

I have a great deal of respect for the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, particularly the work he has done on problem betting and gambling. I look forward to our debates on that issue in this Bill. He has been rather shy in neglecting to mention the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 that arose from the coalition Government. The Minister and others will know that, prior to the Act—which was groundbreaking legislation —prisoners were turfed out of prison on Friday evening with £46 and within a few hours were in the company of ne’er-do-wells, drug-dealers and others who were leading them back to a life of crime. That was the beginning of rehabilitation being taken seriously for offenders who were not at the top end of seriousness in their offences: there was drug testing and a need to attend appointments; specific, targeted help for young people; the beginning of rehabilitation activity requirement as a policy; and bespoke treatment for female offenders, which is something I know the Minister cares deeply about.

I welcome this amendment and the imperative of the wording. While it is important to respect the discretion of the judiciary, to put in the Bill a requirement that we use that time in as efficacious a way as possible, to ensure that those who have the most acute problems and who will cause the most acute problems, as my noble friend Lady Porter put it—