Imprisonment for Public Protection (Re-sentencing) Bill [HL]

Lord Garnier Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of the Prison Reform Trust and as an unashamed admirer of my good friend the Minister for all that he did as chairman of the PRT and as chief executive of Timpson, before he became Prisons Minister, in advancing the cause of prison reform and the welfare of prisoners and former prisoners.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, for his thoughtful and thought-provoking speech in support of his Bill, and I thank him for his Bill which provides us with an early opportunity in the tenure of this Government to debate the troubling issue of IPP sentences. Several of us—I see a number of others in their places in your Lordships’ House this morning—have been hammering away about this subject for many years. Although, thanks to the previous Lord Chancellor, my good friend Alex Chalk, some progress in bringing this brutal regime to an end has been made, it is fair to say that finishing the work that began with the abolition of the sentence in 2012 still looks some way off.

The latest MoJ figures from September 2024 tell us that there 1,095 offenders serving an IPP sentence who have never been released from prison on licence. Of these unreleased prisoners who have served their minimum tariff, about two-thirds have been held for more than 10 years beyond their tariff. There are, as the noble Lord mentioned a moment ago, almost 1,600—the number is 1,599—offenders subject to IPP sentences who are in prison on recall.

The English language is a rich one, but even it runs short of adjectives to describe the disgusting state of affairs that is described by people being recalled to prison for an indefinite period for minor breaches of their licences, having already been released many years after the tariff has expired. We must stop recalling people who have committed trivial or non-serious breaches of their licence.

Time does not permit me to set out the whole litany of disgraceful aspects of the IPP regime. For present purposes, while I can concede that there will be political and practical difficulties and risks for the Government, and additional burdens for the court, in having to administer a resentencing exercise for the 2,700 or so IPP prisoners in custody and the hundreds, if not thousands, of others out on licence, saying that it is all too difficult and that we can improve things only at a risk-averse glacial pace is unacceptable, inhumane and uncivilised. If the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who I am delighted to see in his place, the Labour Home Secretary who legislated for IPP 20 years ago, can bravely speak up for the need for reform, the current Labour Government should have the courage and decency to bring this miserable saga to an end without delay. As the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, indicated, resentencing does not necessarily mean immediate release from custody or licence restrictions in every case, although I suspect that in about 90% of cases that should be the result.

As the late Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood memorably said several times in your Lordships’ House, the IPP sentence and its consequences are a stain on our criminal justice system. It may not be easy or convenient to remove that stain, but it is not impossible. The Government have a moral duty urgently to remove it, and now is not too soon.

Imprisonment for Public Protection (Re-sentencing) Bill [HL]

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Huge benefit can be obtained from using the places that are elsewhere. Those are the points that we ought to think about when looking at these amendments. If all else fails, we should have an expert committee—but we should not have a committee unless it is able to get somewhere, because, otherwise, it will raise false hope.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, for his continued campaign in this area. I also thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and my noble friend Lord Moylan for their remarks in support of the campaign and the general thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, discussed.

It is very tempting in Committee on a short Bill such as this to want to rehearse the Second Reading debate. Unlike the noble and learned Lord, who analysed the problems before us with a forensic stiletto, I tend to come from the blunderbuss school of argument. I would prefer to give this piece of injustice a thorough whacking, but, unfortunately, that would not be helpful; it would be repetitive and would probably not move the Government.

Because I am familiar with the Justice Ministers on the Front Bench, I know that they both find themselves in a position in which they would rather not be. They did not invent the IPP and are not responsible for its progress since 2003. I suspect that they heartily wish they were dealing with something else—but they are not, and they have to deal with this, so here we all are.

I will make one or two brief points. You could not put a cigarette paper between me and the noble and learned Lord in relation to the remarks he just made. The IPP sentence is uncontroversially unjust. It is also uncontroversial to say that, within the sentence as a whole, there are elements that aggravate that injustice. As the noble and learned Lord pointed out, the absurdities of the recall regime—the monstrous consequence of a slight breach in a recall or the terms of a licence—can lead to a recall in relation to something that has nothing whatever to do with the initial offence. In addition, there is the inability of the state properly to police the return of people to imprisonment without a separate and new trial in relation to wholly different allegations.

All those things ought to stick in our craws, and I think they probably do. However, we feel bound up in the bureaucracy and the sheer inability to move things along, because there are so many other moving parts in the world of public policy. One is never able to clear a path through to achieve what we all want to do: to end every consequence of the IPP regime, consequences which were to some extent ameliorated by the 2008 changes and by the abolition of the sentence in 2012. None the less, we are still here having these debates—wringing our hands and having anguished discussions—when we all know what we need to do.

I will do my best to return to the amendments and then I will stop talking. An expert committee is fine, but we have several hundred experts—they are called judges. It seems to me that by sitting either singly or in batches of two or three, they could form lots of expert committees to break the back of this problem.