Sentencing Bill

Gareth Snell Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My right hon. Friend may well be right. A number of the policies introduced by this Government have had the most extraordinary unintended consequences. The Secretary of State said earlier that a number of people have been recalled. That is because of the failure of the Government’s policy; it is because they let people out on early release when they should not have been let out. Who knows what the unintended consequences of these policies are? But let me ask one thing of every Member of this House: think what you would say to the victim of Daniel Tweed. Should that man be walking the streets of this country, or should he be in jail? I know what I would say. I know what we believe on this side of the House.

Ministers defend this policy by saying that short sentences are counterproductive, noting that 62% of offenders who served under 12 months reoffended within a year, but here’s a thing: 100% of criminals left on the streets have the opportunity to reoffend immediately. It is cold comfort to the victim of burglary that a man who ransacked her home gets a stern talking to, unpaid work or, worse, “prison outside prison”—that ludicrous and empty slogan put out by the Justice Secretary’s predecessor—rather than even a few months behind bars. Short sentences exist for a reason. Sometimes a short sharp shock is exactly what is needed to change behaviour, and sometimes a short sentence is the only thing standing between a dangerous individual and his or her next victim. The approach in this Bill is totally naive.

The Government celebrate their new earned-release progression model as the centrepiece of the Bill—a Texas-inspired scheme, we are told. Well, this could not be further from Texas if the Justice Secretary tried. Texas’s incarceration rate is triple that of England. Who exactly will benefit from the right hon. Gentleman’s new scheme? Burglars, rapists, paedophiles, and those convicted of domestic abuse-related offences such as battery, stalking, and coercive and controlling behaviour. Disgracefully, all such prisoners who supposedly behave themselves will be released after serving just a third of their sentence—yes, one third. They have to behave themselves, not be rehabilitated, as the Secretary of State suggested. They do not have to come out with some skill, course or restorative justice; they must just not be a thug while they are in jail. Is that all we are asking for now?

Only the so-called most dangerous offenders are excluded. Forgive me if I am not reassured. If a violent domestic abuser, who was given, say, nine years, can stroll out of prison in three years because he attended a few workshops and kept his nose clean on the inside, how exactly does that protect the public, how does that protect the victim and how is that justice? The Conservative Government had moved to toughen sentences for serious crimes, requiring many violent and sexual offenders to serve two thirds of their term before release precisely to stop such tragedies. Now the Justice Secretary seeks to reverse that vital progress and water it down again to half. Hard-working, law-abiding citizens are being told that their safety hinges on a criminal’s good behaviour after conviction, rather than the severity of the crime itself. Public safety should depend on what criminals did to their victims and whether they remain a threat to the public, not on whether they earn gold stars on a prison conduct chart.

To sugar-coat the largest reduction in sentences in the history of our country, the Government promise intensive supervision of offenders in the community. Even that assumes that our Probation Service, which the Secretary of State was right to say is stretched to breaking point, has the capacity to monitor the beeping lights on all these new tracking devices. At Justice questions, he himself said that the contract was not working, yet we are now going to place even more reliance on tags—tags for goodness’ sake—but is that justice? Who exactly will watch the offenders? We are told that probation officers are already swamped and that, struggling with huge caseloads and staff shortages, they are at 104% capacity. Now, every petty thief, burglar and drug dealer who would have spent a few months in prison will instead be out in the community with a mere tag between them and their potential victim. Is the Justice Secretary seriously suggesting that this will stop a violent offender abusing their partner? If he is, he should explain that to the House.

What of the expanded menu of community restrictions of which Ministers are so proud? The Bill gives courts the powers to ban offenders from certain activities and places—bars, pubs, sporting events—and the press release issued to the media gleefully talked about criminals being barred from football matches and pubs as a way to curtail their freedom. However, do any Labour MPs here truly believe that these bans will strike fear into the hearts of hardened offenders? Don’t be ridiculous! A career burglar or repeat shoplifter will not quiver at the thought of being forbidden from entering the Dog & Duck—ridiculous!

I turn to some of the less trumpeted parts of the Bill—the changes to parole and the oversight of the Sentencing Council. These are technical on the surface, but they reveal much about the Government’s priorities. First, on parole, in a little-noticed clause—clause 38—the Bill repeals the power that would have allowed the Secretary of State to require certain parole board cases to have particular members, such as ex-police officers, on the panel. That power was designed by the last Government to ensure that, for the most serious and high-stakes release decisions, there was a law enforcement perspective in the room, with someone who has seen the worst of what offenders can do. Now the Justice Secretary has just scrapped it entirely before it even came into force. So when a convicted murderer or rapist comes up for parole, they will no longer be guaranteed that there is a voice of law enforcement or a victims’ champion at the hearing. Removing that safeguard tilts the balance further in favour of the prisoner’s release.

Secondly, on the Sentencing Council, the Labour Government’s Sentencing Bill lifts its central idea from a Bill we previously put before the House, which they voted down but now support, having wasted Parliament’s time with an interim Act. Yet after all that, they water it down. They propose to force the Sentencing Council, which drafts judges’ guidelines, to get approval from the Lord Chancellor and the Lord or Lady Chief Justice for new guidelines and to submit an annual plan for ministerial sign-off. That is political oversight in principle—something Labour voted against when we proposed a stronger version—but in practice it is too little, too late. Only after I raised this issue on the Floor of the House did Ministers scramble to block those outrageous guidelines at the eleventh hour. Even the former Justice Secretary had to admit that such “differential treatment is unacceptable”. But remember, if Labour had listened to us sooner, this entire debacle would have been avoided.

The Sentencing Council is a creature of the last Labour Government—a quango deliberately insulated from democratic accountability. We warned that an unchecked council would go rogue and it did. Sure enough, it tried to rewrite sentencing by stealth and almost succeeded. Labour’s belated tweak, requiring ministerial sign-off on guidelines, adopts our position that the council needs democratic oversight, but it barely scratches the surface. The truth is that the council is a totally flawed structure. When Labour set it up in 2009, they made it answerable to nobody. As a result, an unelected body nearly smuggled in identity-based sentencing.

If the Justice Secretary really opposes identity-based sentencing, let us look at what is in the pipeline. Will he use this power on the forthcoming immigration guidelines, signed off by the previous Labour Lord Chancellor, which will deny Parliament’s clear will that immigration offenders should be locked up and subject to automatic deportation? Will he scrap those guidelines? They are in his in-tray. He is taking the power to do so. It is on him.

Despite this being a new role for the right hon. Gentleman, I am sorry to say that the Justice Secretary cannot feign ignorance on this approach. It was his 2017 review that fixated on statistical disparities in the justice system. His answer was not to enforce the law impartially; it was to impose outcomes by quota. His review’s guiding principle was “explain or reform”, effectively demanding that if an institution cannot explain a disparity in minority outcomes, it must change its practices until the numbers look equal. In theory, that sounds like holding the system to account. In reality, it invites social engineering and double standards.

The right hon. Gentleman openly champions equity over equality. In plainer terms, that means believing in bias by design—a justice system that explicitly favours some groups in order to tweak the statistics. We just saw the consequences of that thinking. The Sentencing Council’s two-tier guidelines were a textbook application of the Justice Secretary’s long-held belief: a two-tier system where justice is not blind, as it must be, but rather squints at your skin colour, your gender, your faith or your age before deciding how to punish you. On the Conservative Benches, we will always believe in the universal principle of equality before the law, not equity. That is the difference.

Turning to the matter of foreign criminals, for all the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks, as of 30 June this year there were 10,772 foreign nationals in our prisons—12% of the total. That is up on last year.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am enjoying the right hon. Gentleman’s one-man show on why he should be leader of the Conservative party. He will get no argument from me on the fact that we need to reduce the number of foreign national offenders in our prisons—I agree that that is what we do need to do, as does my party. However, between 2019 and 2024 under his Government, the numbers increased by 12%. He knows that it is a difficult thing to achieve; he knows there is no simple answer, because if there was, his party would have done it when it was in government. Rather than offering simple magic-wand solutions, what is he actually suggesting that we do to deliver a reduction? If he knows the answer, why did he not do it when he was in government?

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Gentleman is on rocky ground, because the Justice Secretary literally put his name to a letter stopping the then Government deporting foreign criminals from our country back to their own countries. [Interruption.] He did, I am afraid, as I think did the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. You literally could not make it up, Madam Deputy Speaker.

What is the answer to the question from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell)? It is simple: change our human rights laws and address the European convention on human rights so that it is possible to remove each and every foreign national offender in a timely fashion, and then use every lever of the British state—whether it is revoking visas or suspending foreign aid—to achieve that.

Let me give the House an example of just how ludicrous the present situation is. When the Justice Secretary was Foreign Secretary, it was reported that he got into a debate with Pakistan over whether it would take back three grooming gang perpetrators—rapists—to their home country. Pakistan held out, saying that in return for taking back its own citizens—despicable rape gang perpetrators—we needed to agree to resume flights from a disreputable airline that has had safety challenges in the past. How weak is this country? How weak is this country that we will not stand up to that? We are giving more than £100 million a year in foreign aid to Pakistan. We should be using every lever of the British state to get these people out of our country and our prisons so that we do not have to carry out the early release of dangerous people, which is what this Bill will do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Snell]

The shadow Minister is reading out a series of crimes that are reprehensible, and no one in this House would want to see the individuals who commit such crimes having anything but the book thrown at them. In the spirit and tone in which he has read that list out, his Government oversaw a 2.6% charge rate for people who were arrested for rape. Does he want to say anything to the House about that particular damning figure? There are people today who have not been let out of prison early, because they never even got there in the first place. What does he say to that?

[Dr Mullan]

The hon. Member will have noted that at the outset of my remarks I said that I have never been entirely in support of all the policies of a Government of either party on these issues. He has every right to make those criticisms, but they do not change the vote he is being asked to make tonight. They do not change the policy he will be putting his name to and supporting. There is no excuse for the things he will be changing on a permanent—not temporary—basis to deal with a short-term prison crisis. I do not think that that is what any Government Member’s constituents want.

These profound and permanent changes to our sentencing laws are the exact opposite of what the vast majority of victims, their families and the public want. They will sit on the record of those Members and this Government until the next election. They will need to justify themselves to their voters. I do not believe that the majority of Labour Members, deep down, want to support such changes tonight. It will be a great compliment to party managers if, after this reality has been spelled out to Labour Members, they decide to support this Bill anyway. If they speak to their constituents like I speak to mine, and ask them about child abusers and rapists, their constituents will tell them that they are already concerned by the limited time they spend in prison, which undermines justice. We have heard so many times from Members in this House about the horror of rape and other sexual offences, about the victims of grooming gangs and about the horror of all kinds of sexual abuse. Not once do I recall a campaign or a concern raised by Members that the answer is to make such offenders spend less time in prison.

I accept that there is a different debate to be had about different cohorts of offenders and different offences. There is always a tension between prison time as a punishment and helping to rehabilitate offenders. As others have said, and I agree, I do not think the Bill strikes the right balance in that area, but I respect those Government Members and members of the public who would draw the line in a different place from me for certain types of offences and offenders. However, we are not talking about drug addicts stealing to fund their habit, or the young man from a broken home who spent their childhood in care and vandalises the local playground. The hon. Members for Forest of Dean (Matt Bishop), for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes) and the hon. Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson), and others coherently and sensibly raised the debates we might have about how long those individuals spend in prison and how we rehabilitate them.

However, here we are talking about rapists and paedophiles—criminals who sexually assault children, criminals who create sexual images of children and circulate them around the world and criminals who snatch unsuspecting women walking home through a park, drag them into the bushes and rape them. Those are the sorts of criminals that Labour Members will agree should be let out of prison earlier if they support this Bill.

We should be clear that not a single voice among victims’ representatives supports this element of the Bill—not a single one. The Victims’ Commissioner does not support it. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner does not support it. Justice for Victims does not support it. Victim Support does not support it. The Victims’ Commissioner for London does not support it. Apparently, however, we will see this evening that Labour MPs do.

Let me also clear up any confusion about the circumstances under which these violent and sexual offenders will be released early. Members, innocently, may have been led to believe that prisoners will have to jump over considerable hurdles to secure early release. In fact, the former Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Birmingham Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) told us they would need to “earn” their release. The reality of the proposals in the Bill make clear what a complete sham that suggestion was. Actually, prisoners will actively need to break prison rules to run the risk of losing early release. That is not earning anything. That is doing what the majority of the public do day in, day out, without any reward—just behaving themselves and not breaking the rules. Apparently, however, if a rapist or a child abuser does it, Labour Members think that should entitle them to walk away from the proper punishment that they have been given for their crimes.

In fact, what Labour said to the press in an attempt to manage the news of this terrible set of policies gave the impression that the large discounts amounting to, in some cases, many years off prison time could be quickly reversed for bad behaviour, and that this was a radical departure. While the amount of time after which the Government are choosing to let people out is certainly radical, the mechanism to keep people in is nothing of the sort. As we see in the detail of the Bill, they will simply make use of the existing prison punishment legislation.

I wonder whether Labour Members are aware of the average number of days in prison that is added by the prison punishment regime. According to the latest data I could find, the average number of additional days given to a prisoner who breaks the rules is 16. When sentences for rapists and child abusers will be discounted by many months and years, they run the risk of having a handful of days added back on for breaking prison rules. That is shameful, and it does not apply only to the offences that I have mentioned. The hon. Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes) spoke about a 15 year sentence, and about how the victims of the person concerned would feel about their not being given a lifelong driving ban. How will they feel when they are told that instead of serving 15 years in prison, that person will spend five years there?

The parlous state of this Government is a blessing for Labour Members tonight. There are many other issues receiving media coverage at present—the political survival of the Prime Minister himself is in question—so they may get away with voting this Bill through unnoticed. However, this is just the first stage. I know that the timetable for the Bill is as short as the Government could make it—just a day of Committee of the whole House, which also means that the many victims groups will not be able to come before the House and voice their objections, and then one day for Report and Third Reading. The Government clearly hope that the Bill will also go through its future stages unnoticed by their constituents, who, they hope, will not know that Labour MPs want to let rapists and paedophiles out of prison earlier. [Interruption.] That is the reality of the Bill that they are voting through. Labour Members are chuntering and saying, “Shameful.” What is shameful is that they are preparing to vote for that policy this evening. Shame on all of them.

The Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Justice Secretary and I will do our utmost to hold Labour Members to account for this grave, grave injustice to victims and their families. We will do our best to make sure that their constituents do know, do hold them to account, and do understand the choice that they make in the end. I honestly do not believe, despite the chuntering, that that is a choice many of them would want to make if they had listened clearly to the position that I have set out. I do not think it is a choice that any of them came to this place to make.

We have seen Labour Back Benchers exercise their power over the welfare Bill. They can do that again—if not tonight, in future stages of the Bill, because we will seek to amend it. Labour Members can support us in that. Rape, assault by penetration, rape of a child under 13, assault of a child under 13 by penetration, inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, paying for the sexual services of a child under 13, kidnapping or false imprisonment with the intention of committing a sexual offence, creating or possessing indecent photographs of children—tell your Whips that you will not support people responsible for those offences being let out of prison early. Do your job as representatives of your constituents, do your job as advocates for women and girls—