Criminal Justice System

Lord Goodhart Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodhart]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord German on his admirable maiden speech, and thank him very much for delivering it neither in German nor in Welsh. Wales is a nation that is famous for its singers and its orators. I know that he must be a fine singer, as his earlier career was as head of music in schools in Cardiff. He is certainly a fine orator, as I can vouch having heard him at many party conferences and again today. As a Member of the National Assembly for Wales from its inception until this year, he can among other things give us very good advice on coalitions, because he was a Minister in the Labour-Lib Dem coalition in the Welsh Administration from 2000 to 2003. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece on her very moving speech, and I look forward very much to hearing both of them often in the future.

I will concentrate my remarks on the subject that I raised in a debate a few months ago during consideration of one of the massive criminal justice Bills which the previous Government used to introduce every six months or so—indeterminate sentences. Those sentences are known as IPPs—imprisonment for public protection. They were created by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and modified by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

For the most serious crimes, the maximum sentence is life imprisonment and is usually subject to release on licence. For crimes that are not quite so serious, there is an upper limit to the length of the sentence, or there was until the Criminal Justice Act 2003. That Act introduced IPPs, which are in effect a form of life sentence. They mean that prisoners who have been convicted of certain violent or sexual offences may be retained in prison beyond the maximum duration allocated to the sentence for that particular offence, and will not be released until they have served first the tariff prescribed by the judge and then until the Parole Board is in due course satisfied that the risk of further serious offences has been reduced to an acceptable level. That may sound worthy, but in practice IPPs have turned out to be an expensive failure. The figures are quite startling. As of 4 June this year, the number of people who are currently subject to the IPP was 6,189. Only 93 of these were released on licence; the rest remain in prison. As of 5 July 2010, 2,860 prisoners subject to IPP were still in detention even though they were past the end of the tariff period which had been allocated to them. Assuming that there were no significant differences between 4 June and 5 July, only 3.5 per cent of those eligible for release have been released, which is extraordinary. What is the reason for this surprisingly small number of releases?

In theory, it could be that prisoners on IPP are a particularly wicked lot, and with some of them that is true, but a very powerful report, published 18 months ago by the Chief Inspectors of Prisons and Probation indicated that there were several other causes. They include the difficulty in identifying which prisoners present a serious risk of repeating their crimes, with the result that a good many prisoners are on IPP who should not have been there to begin with; the difficulty of providing training courses which have to be undergone by prisoners before they can be released on licence; the frequent movement of IPP prisoners from one prison where training is available to another where it is not; the failure to provide adequate expert evidence to the Parole Board to enable it to reach fair judgments of the risk of release of a prisoner on licence; and, finally, the delays in bringing cases before the Parole Board.

I should like to pay again a short tribute to Dame Anne Owers after her nine years of exceptional service. She was a worthy successor to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who will be speaking in a few minutes. I have known her since 1990 when I was chair of a committee which appointed her the director of Justice, a job she filled with extraordinary success.

That however is not the only relevant report. Only a few days ago, the Prison Reform Trust published a report called, Unjust Deserts. The foreword to the report was written by my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell. That is a name of great distinction in this field because the noble Lord was an outstanding Home Secretary. The conclusions of the report state that the Ministry of Justice needs as a matter of urgency to review social and financial costs and benefits of IPP sentences; there needs to be much better provision of training courses for IPP prisoners; there must be additional resources for parole hearings to enable hearings to be held shortly after the prisoner reaches the tariff date and becomes eligible for release; and there must be training guidance for Parole Board members because the justice system needs to provide better public understanding about the levels of risk involved.

At present, IPP is not just a failure, it is an expensive failure. There are far too many people in prison at great expense who should never have had an indeterminate sentence to begin with or who should have been released on licence at an earlier date. To make IPP work properly would involve further expense, which could not be justified in present circumstances. There may be a case for keeping a small number of IPP prisoners where there is a real probability—not just a possibility—that they will commit serious offences if they are released. The Prison Reform Trust report recognises that IPP in its present state must surely go. It is clear that it was a great mistake in its form. It would be extremely expensive to set that form right. The only real solution for the time being is to get rid of it.

I am very glad that we have chosen the reform of the criminal justice system and its effectiveness as the subject for this debate. I am even more glad that the present Lord Chancellor has shown interest in reducing the number of people in prison. That is entirely different from the successive Home Secretaries of the previous Government who one after the other ratcheted up the length of sentences and invented new offences at every opportunity.