Imprisonment for Public Protection Sentences

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) for bringing forward the debate and for the Justice Committee’s report. I was proud formerly to serve on the Committee under his leadership, and I can personally attest to his dedication and the Committee’s rigorous approach to its work. The report is no exception.

We have heard powerful contributions. The hon. Member set out in great detail the Select Committee’s findings after many evidence sessions and highlighted the inadequacy of the Government’s response. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) talked about a Kafkaesque process and the need for cross-party support, which I will talk more about. The hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly) mentioned Thomas who, 10 years on, is still in prison serving a sentence that had a tariff of two years. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) talked about setting up an expert committee to look at how resentencing could work and raised some really important points. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) talked about a lack of intervention in prisons and spoke powerfully about his constituents’ experiences.

When IPP sentences were introduced, it was anticipated that they would be given to 900 people. In fact, between 2005 and 2013, they were given to more than 8,000 people. After concerns were raised that the sentences were being applied much more widely than originally intended, the use of IPPs was rightly abolished in 2012, but, as we know, that change did not apply retrospectively. As a result, at the end of 2022, there were still just short of 3,000 prisoners in custody under IPP sentences.

As has been outlined, countless testimonies and studies have shown the link between serving an IPP sentence and deteriorating mental health, self-harm and suicide. Eighty-one IPP prisoners have taken their own lives while in prison. In 2022 alone, there were nine suicides—the highest number of any year since IPPs were introduced. In 2021, IPP prisoners made up 11% of all self-harm incidents recorded, despite being only 3% of the entire prison population.

Those issues are compounded by the fact that, after a decade of cuts to the justice system, prisons are now understaffed, overcrowded and awash with violence and drugs. In too many cases, prisoners are spending up to 23 hours a day in their cells, with little to no purposeful activity. In a system under such strain, IPP prisoners have often been placed right at the back of the queue. Many have been unable to address their offending because they have been denied access to the courses necessary to demonstrate their rehabilitation. In some cases, the courses they need simply do not exist in the prisons they are in; in other cases, lifers have been given support ahead of IPP prisoners. A lack of mental health support and awareness of neurodiverse conditions has also made it easier to stigmatise an inmate as a problem rather than offer them the support they need to reform.

Given those conditions, it is no wonder that so many IPP inmates and their families have lost hope, and the problems do not stop there. Recalls are rising. As the chief inspector of probation outlined, most recalls to prisons are for non-compliance with licence conditions, rather than for new crimes. Non-compliance often results from homelessness, a relapse into substance misuse and a lack of continuity of care between pre and post-release service provision. In short, failing services are leading to unsuccessful licences, which means that we are setting up too many IPP releases to fail. They are put back into custody in a system that sets them goals it does not allow them to meet.

Many IPP sentences were more a judgment on an individual’s chaotic life than their risk, making it near impossible for them to prove their suitability for release. For example, Charlotte was a 30-year-old drug addict when she was sentenced to a minimum of 16 months in prison. She had been begging outside a corner shop, and when a woman refused to give her money, she pulled out a knife. She did not attempt to stab the woman, but she did terrify her. Nine years later, in July 2016, she died in prison. It was an awful crime, of course, but a disproportionate outcome given that for threats with a weapon, the mandatory minimum sentence is six months’ custody and the maximum sentence is four years.

As we have heard today, there are some cases where the continued detention of individuals appears unduly harsh, given the nature of their original crime or the length of their original tariff. There have been resulting calls from those individuals’ families and justice organisations for reform of the system. Equally, there are a large number of individuals serving IPP sentences whose continued detention has rightly been deemed necessary for public protection by successive Parole Boards. That includes many sex offenders and violent criminals. Any blanket amnesty for those individuals, who include the black cab rapist, John Worboys, would create a serious and unacceptable risk to public safety. Various proposals have been made, including by the Justice Committee, about ways to address the potential unfairness of outstanding IPP sentences without exposing the public to the risk that would arise from releasing all those currently serving them.

Whatever party is in power, I believe it is paramount that we approach any discussion of reform on a cross-party basis, just as the Justice Committee did, consulting victims’ groups as well as justice organisations. We must avoid at all costs the future of those prisoners becoming a political football. On that basis, if the Government are willing to bring forward meaningful proposals on how to solve the situation, Labour will engage with them in a constructive, cross-party way. It is important that the Government understand that we are willing to work with them to move forward on this issue constructively. I am keen to hear the Minister’s response to that.

We must also recognise that problems do not just lie with IPPs. Even if individuals on IPP sentences are eventually released on licence by a Parole Board, to keep us safe we are still reliant on a functioning probation system to ensure those individuals comply with their licence conditions and do not lapse back into the behaviours that originally made them a risk. The precursor of any reform must therefore be a probation system that works, yet after 13 years of the Tories, the probation service is buckling at the seams. Under Labour, probation was well regarded and fulfilled its aims of keeping the public safe and rehabilitating those it supervised, but after more than a decade of underfunding and chaotic organisational change, which has led to many experienced staff leaving, it is today failing. Inspection report after inspection report detail systemic failures, and it is the public who pay the price with their safety.

There have been an average of six serious further offence convictions every week since 2010, including for murder, kidnap and rape. The reality is that our criminal justice system has been pushed to the brink, and if the Government were truly concerned about protecting public safety, they would urgently plug the gaps and rebuild the service they broke.

We all recognise the problems that IPP sentences have caused, but we must also recognise the numerous complexities surrounding them and the pressures on our stretched criminal justice system. I welcome the Department’s new leadership, and I hope the Government will seriously look at this issue again. If they bring forward proposals, we will engage with them in a constructive, cross-party way with the priority of public safety at the centre of that approach.