Queen’s Speech

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, many speeches have already touched on the promise—or do I mean threat?—of a new human rights Bill. I proposed to focus on just one topic that I fear may feature in such a Bill: the role of a Parole Board.

Shortly before we prorogued, the Justice Secretary published a document, Root and Branch Review of the Parole System. I confess to having found that a difficult, not to say alarming, document, not least for the IPPs—that unfortunate group of prisoners, many of whom remain detained 10 or 12 years after serving their due punishment, and indeed 10 years after the whole discredited regime was abolished in 2012. One such high-profile IPP prisoner was Tracey Connelly, Baby P’s mother, who in 2009 got such a sentence with a five-year tariff for not preventing that most ghastly and tragic of deaths. I hold no particular brief for the mother, but I do hold a brief for the Parole Board.

In 2013 the mother was released on licence but two years later, in 2015, she was recalled for an unspecified breach of licence conditions. She then failed successive Parole Board reviews until at last, in March of this year, the board decided to release her, subject to stringent licence conditions. At this point Mr Raab, adopting what one can see only as an essentially populist stance, intervened, as I accept was his right. He sought a reconsideration of that release decision by a Parole Board member, a retired judge, arguing—as he had to—that the decision was irrational. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the challenge failed, and the mother, having served in all some 11 years, is now finally to be released on conditions. Is that approach, one wonders, now to change?

During the last 30 years, it has been clearly established that under the Strasbourg convention—the human rights convention—in indeterminate sentence cases it is for the judiciary, not for the Executive, as it always used to be, to determine both the appropriate tariff term for punishment before parole can even be considered, and also the time when the prisoner should finally be released on licence. It is the Parole Board, an independent quasi-judicial body, which has the latter role. Is that now to be changed?

In the root and branch review, Mr Raab said that the Government would introduce “a precautionary principle” into the assessment of risk and a

“Ministerial check on release decisions”—

later called an oversight—in cases involving

“those who have committed the most serious crimes”.

These, the “top-tier cohort”, are those convicted of murder, rape or terrorism and

“Causing or Allowing the death of a child”.

As to these, Mr Raab said that

“the Justice Secretary will have the power to refuse release, subject to judicial challenge, on … clearly prescribed grounds, in the upper tribunal.”—[Official Report, Commons, 30/3/22; col. 831.]

Well, I fear that we are in for an ever-increasing prison population.

When I went on the High Court Bench, almost 40 years ago now—although not as long ago as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—the average term served by murderers was roughly some 12 years. It is now often more than double that. For the remaining IPP prisoners, unless the grave injustice that they are already suffering is to be increased yet further by some newly introduced “precautionary principle”, they need the Parole Board to exercise some measure of understanding and compassion. Let us hope that the report on IPPs, now awaited from the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice, will see it that way too.