Sentencing Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness.

I find myself speaking in the company of very distinguished and knowledgeable noble Lords, with great judicial experience and knowledge of the sentencing system in its widest sense. I am not in that company. I would venture to say, though, that I have considerable sympathy with what the Government are trying to achieve here. I have doubts about the efficacy of ever longer prison sentences, and indeed about their purpose. Listening to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, I allowed myself a measure of doubt about whether we have a clear notion of the purpose of prison. After all, prison as we understand it is a relatively modern idea; it goes back only to Jeremy Bentham. It is a sort of 200-year experiment. If the right reverend Prelate is going to give us an opportunity, in the course of the Bill, to give some consideration to what we are actually trying to achieve and whether we are succeeding, that might be of some general benefit.

However, I want to follow the speech so eloquently made by my noble friend Lord Hailsham, when he spoke about IPP prisoners, a subject also referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. This scandal continues to fester. At its height, in 2012, there were 6,000 prisoners subject to the IPP regime. According to the latest figures supplied by the Ministry of Justice, 14 years later, that figure has now come down to 2,422 in custody, 1,476 of whom are on recall. Nearly 1,000—946—have never been released, 14 years after the sentence was abolished. Many of them, I think nearly all of them now, are beyond the tariff that they deserved and were given at the time of their original sentencing. Many of them are years, as much as a decade, beyond the tariff that they were given.

One has to acknowledge progress and good will. Undoubtedly, the Minister, but also his predecessors from a previous Government, have come to this task with great good will, a recognition of the injustice and a wish to bring it to an end, but the furthest that they have been able to go when dealing with those prisoners who are in prison is an action plan, which has not materially changed with the change of government. The last Government, as we know, made considerable progress, in the Victims and Prisoners Act, in alleviating the position of prisoners who are out on licence, but my focus is on those who are not out on licence but still in prison for one of the two reasons I have mentioned: either never released or on recall.

The action plan has certainly seen a reduction in numbers—even in the last year, numbers have been reduced—but if one focuses briefly on those who have never been released, one sees that the action plan is losing its effectiveness, because one is getting to that number of prisoners who will always be a challenge for the probation system to approve for release, many of them because of mental health difficulties acquired as a result of their experiences while serving the sentence. The challenge for the Minister is to recognise that there needs to be something over and above the action plan to help deal with those people and find some path back to giving them justice—justice being simply that one serves the sentence that arises as a result of the crime one has committed. We see very little sign of that, but the Bill offers us opportunities to do it.

We have seen ideas. The Justice Committee in the Commons, late in the last Government, had a proposal for resentencing—the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, has a live Private Member’s Bill which would put that into effect. We have great hopes, I think, in the report of the Howard League more recently, chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd—who I am glad to see in his place and due to speak later in this debate—the essential effects of which were described by my noble friend Lord Hailsham. The question for the Minister is whether he intends, with vigour, to take up some of the ideas being offered to him; whether he will use the Bill as a means of doing so; and whether he will enter urgent talks. I cannot criticise him for failing to talk to noble Lords. He has been very good about holding cross-party round tables—in fact, his secretary is in the process of organising another one for next month—but will he sit down, as my noble friend suggested, in the course of the Bill and engage in cross-party discussions as to how the Bill can become a vehicle for addressing, in particular, those who have no hope of release, whether through the recommendations of the Howard League or some other means? That would be a huge advance.

I leave those thoughts with noble Lords. It is a huge omission that the Government have so far not included them in the Bill. The Minister began by saying that they were not included, but there are enough of us across the House to see amendments tabled, perhaps with some effect, to bring them back into the Bill. This is the opportunity in this parliamentary session to do that and, if the opportunity passes, more time will be lost and more unjustified suffering will be endured as a result of our lack of dispatch and engagement with this issue.