Sentencing Bill

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 6th January 2026 Lords Chamber

It is completely unreasonable to carry on as we are. As the noble and learned Lord said, we hope that at the 11th hour we will hear a reasonable and statesmanlike reply from the Minister.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, set out with great clarity the cogency of his proposed new clause. I entirely support it and, if he wishes to test the opinion of the House, I shall join him.

Many of the amendments in the group we are dealing with are concerned with providing a mechanism through the Parole Board. My amendment proposes another new clause that would not use the Parole Board but rather a panel of existing or former judges. The protection to deal with the risk that people seem to be fearful of is provided through that route rather than through a Parole Board decision.

I will come to explain the detail of my proposed new clause, but I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, who is not in his place, for their support for this new clause. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said a moment ago, it is uncontroversial that nobody of any humanity or sentience thinks that this IPP regime was a good idea or should be allowed to continue—and continue to cause harm. When the Minister winds up, will he admit or accept, on behalf of the Government, that the IPP regime as currently administered is causing real harm to people in prison and on licence outside prison, who are in danger for reasons wholly unconnected with the original offence that gave them the IPP in the first place? Will he accept that it is doing our reputation as a place of fairness and justice real harm? There is not an angle from which you could come at this problem without feeling dirty and appalled by the way in which it is being continued.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and I looked at 60 sets of case papers dealing with IPP offenders who had all been recalled. A large proportion of them had been recalled for relatively trivial reasons. A large proportion had been recalled for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with the index offence for which they had been originally sentenced. They had returned to prison, and some of them had been released again after a period and then re-recalled, thus extending the ludicrous, Kafkaesque nature of this type of sentence. As Lord Brown said all those years ago, it is a stain on our justice system. It is uncontroversial that where we are now is a disgraceful state of affairs, and it ought to be dealt with.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, cited in general terms some of the information provided to us by UNGRIPP, of which I am a patron. It is an interest group of families of IPP prisoners seeking to reform this regime. As the noble and learned Lord said, 946 people have never been released from their IPP sentence. Of that 946, 940 are in prison over their tariff limit, and 689 are incarcerated between 10 and 20 years beyond their tariff. These are numbers, but they describe real people and real families who are affected by this disgraceful state of affairs.

Just to underline the point about real harm, I note that 1,476 people are currently back in prison on IPP recall. Some 70% of those were recalled for an administrative reason—they failed to turn up for an appointment or they were drunk—but that had nothing whatever to do with the original offence, as I have said any number of times, nor had they committed an additional offence. One thing I learned from the study I did with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, was that, if you are going to recall somebody by virtue of another form of misconduct and it amounts to a criminal offence, they should be prosecuted. They should not just be pulled off the street administratively; they should be charged, tried and sentenced or acquitted on the evidence. There should not be this sneaky little business of just pulling them off the street in an East German or Soviet way.

But that is enough of the figures; let me go back to my new clause. Where I differ from the method advanced by the noble and learned Lord and my noble friend Lord Hailsham is that our new clause would require a panel established by the Secretary of State

“to reconsider the cases of every person subject to a sentence of imprisonment for public protection … and in custody within six months of the date”

on which the Bill is enacted. The panel would consist of 12 judges or former judges under the age of retirement who have sat in the Crown Court, and they would be nominated to serve on the panel by the Lord Chancellor. But while I think that proposed new subsection (6E) is the magic subsection in the noble and learned Lord’s new clause, my proposed subsection (3) is the one that I invite your Lordships to concentrate on, because it introduces a degree of thinking about what is proportionate into the question that has to be discovered.

Subsection (3) reads:

“As soon as practicable after the establishment of the panel, a member of that panel—


so, it will be one judge at a time, not all 12 sitting in a group—

“must reconsider each case and determine whether, having regard to … (a) the nature of the person’s offending”.

Let me say in parenthesis that there will be some people serving an IPP sentence who may have been held to be dangerous because they have committed, for example, a double rape or a vicious, violent assault. But there are some people on IPPs who have done no more—I say “no more” in inverted commas—than commit a street robbery and stolen, with violence or with the threat of violence, somebody’s mobile telephone. They may have done it several times. Yes, that is very bad behaviour, but some of these people, having been given a 12-month or 18-month tariff, are still languishing in prison 20 years later. Is that what we call justice in this country?

Let us bring some sense of proportionality back to the assessment of the offender. Look at the period spent in custody; look at the risk to the public. Of course, we all worry about what risk is and how to assess it, but we have to make an attempt to assess the best, or the least worst, way of mitigating that risk. We either do it through the Parole Board, or we do it, it seems to me, through this judicial panel, but it has to be done. We cannot just sit on our hands and say, “It’s all too difficult”. If it is 10 years too late, if it is five years too late, if it is five weeks too late, if it is five days too late, if it is five minutes too late, it is too late, and we must do something right now.

The judge on the panel would have regard to

“the arrangements that can be made for supervision, rehabilitation and support in the community”.

Many of these people have become catastrophically institutionalised as a consequence of being imprisoned all this time. Just imagine that you have been bunged inside for robbing a person of their telephone—a relatively minor offence in the great canon of criminal affairs—and there you are, 20 years later, possibly having been recalled because you failed to turn up to an appointment at a parole or a probation office, asking yourself, “What on earth is the point? I will either take my own life or I will live in this place till the day I die of natural causes”. Let the panel, let the judge, look at what can be done with regard to supervision, rehabilitation and support outside prison.

If noble Lords are worried about that, the panel judge does not have the final decision, because his or her decision is susceptible to judicial review, and if the Secretary of State does not like it, he can refuse to accept the recommendation. And the Secretary of State’s decision is susceptible to judicial review.

There are different ways of dealing with risk, but whatever way you go at it, you have got to do it. Really, one must stop dallying around and saying, “It’s all too difficult and the Daily Wotsit won’t like it if somebody gets out”. We are bigger and better than that, and we should do something about it.