Sentencing Bill

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 89 on IPP resentencing, and in support of all the other amendments in this group.

I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to make the argument for resentencing to your Lordships again, although I am under no illusions that the Minister is ready to announce a U-turn from this Dispatch Box to wipe this shameful stain off our justice system once and for all—at least not yet. I have no wish either to flog a dead horse but, as I said at Second Reading, it is important for us to continue scrutinising the Government’s position on this industrial-scale miscarriage of justice.

Ministers have consistently refused to consider IPP resentencing, which the Justice Committee in the other place called for as the only solution to this terrible injustice. To put it bluntly, Ministers are still defending the indefensible. We must see this for what it is: inexcusable excuses while more people die—yes, die—and more people give up hope. This must stop; action, not warm words, will be the most important thing going forward.

In this debate, I particularly want to hear the Minister’s objections to the kind of IPP resentencing exercise described by my amendment, which has not been presented to your Lordships in this form before. Crucially, what is new is that the resentencing court can impose a secure hospital order if it thinks this is necessary for public protection, and impose any kind of extended supervision post release—again, for the same reason.

It is widely acknowledged that the IPP sentence itself has caused harm, to put it mildly. Too many unfortunate souls have suffered problems between 2005 and 2012. It is understandable that the Parole Board might have concerns about the poor mental health of some of the people whose cases they are considering, but it is simply wrong and a great injustice that this poor mental health, in many cases caused directly by this long-discredited and abolished sentence passed by this Parliament, is being used to condemn anyone to indefinite preventive detention, stuck in prison where their mental health is just going to get worse. As I said, there will be more suicides and more hopelessness.

Noble friends from across the House have previously described this as a gulag sentence, and they are, of course, correct. The Minister has previously claimed that the Parole Board is best placed to decide whether an IPP prisoner should be released, but there is no evidence of this beyond the justification originally used to create this torture sentence in the first place. It is too slow and too laborious, in spite of recent helpful changes.

Natural justice dictates that it should be the courts, not the Parole Board, that are empowered to make this decision for this cohort. That distinction lies at the heart of this injustice and is the reason why IPP sentences were abolished over a decade ago. The Minister and his officials will of course say, “What about public protection?” The secure hospital backstop I am talking about—originally a suggestion by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, as an amendment to my Private Members’ Bill—is an elegant solution to this conundrum.

Under my amendment, if the resentencing court considers someone to be too mentally ill to be released, it can transfer them to a secure hospital where they can receive the therapeutic resources necessary for recovery. On release, all former IPP prisoners would have the supervision and support considered necessary by the court—another key safeguard to protect the public that should address the concerns previously expressed to us by the Minister. That is why I am proposing, in a nutshell, an IPP resentencing exercise with a secure hospital backstop and public protection right at its heart. I sincerely look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

My Lords, the real issue in this debate is: do we persist with the so-called action plan? I pay tribute to what the Minister has been able to do with a flawed idea, but we have to decide now how we deal with this justly and remedy the injustice. It is useful to reflect that there are people who have never been released. For example, one got a nine-month tariff and has served 20 years; another got a 330-day tariff and served 17 years; one got a six-month tariff and served 16 and a half years; and another got a tariff of three years and five months and served 20 years. Those are the realities, and you judge the seriousness of what they did by those tariffs. I shall come to the misunderstanding at the heart of the MoJ about the problem it is facing.

We also have the deaths. It is important to recall that this involves people committing suicide, and we should not walk away from that. There were nine in 2023, and four in 2024. The population was down, but it might be explained by the hope that had been engendered. My concern is that, if we do not act now, we will have—I use this word deliberately—blood on our hands. We cannot shirk the responsibility for rectifying an injustice, and what an injustice this is. Perhaps we should turn in due course to the “two strikes” injustice, but that is for another day; let us concentrate on IPPs.

We need a just solution. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, has put forward his amendment. I do not want to add to the time we will take on this by giving my views on resentencing, but that is one option. However, the Howard League put forward another proposal, which I have put into an amendment. Very simply, it is to give the Parole Board the power to direct, and to require it to direct, the release of all these people within two years. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, has put forward an amendment to that, suggesting giving the Government the power to apply to the Parole Board. But whether we take the resentencing exercise or this, this must be the last chance of doing anything. If we funk it now, we funk it for ever and we allow the so-called action plan to trundle along for years and years, not remedying an injustice.

Why do we have to do that? There are five points I wish to make. First, the sentence is accepted to be wrong in principle by absolutely everyone. How can we as a nation continue to punish people under a sentence that is wrong in principle and rests on the fallacy of thinking that we can predict human behaviour? There is no justification for continuing this sentence. It is simply unjust.

Secondly, and it pains me to have to say this, there is a complete misunderstanding of this sentence, partly because it was imposed so long ago, and people have moved on. When we are looking at the action plan, it is important to look at what was said in the 2024-25 IPP annual report. The sentence was described in these words:

“It was intended as a means of managing high risk prisoners, who were convicted of an offence where they would be liable to imprisonment for life, but the court did not consider the seriousness of the offence was such to justify the imposition of a sentence of imprisonment for life”.


That is a complete misunderstanding of the sentence. How can we have any confidence in a plan when people do not understand the sentence they are dealing with? I regard this as a very serious problem with this plan. I have had the privilege of being able to look at a number of cases of recall, and it is plain that those who are dealing with this do not understand the problem.

I recognise that when the error was pointed out, the department accepted the error, but it is important to see the harm that such a statement does. It puts the position of these prisoners on a false basis. They did not commit serious offences of the kind described. Many of them, as illustrated by the tariffs to which I have referred, committed offences that are not in the same league, by any imagination, as those committed by those sentenced to life imprisonment. Some of them were sentenced in respect of offences for which the sentence was no greater than five years—I note that the Government think that five years is the sentence for the kind of crime that does not deserve a jury trial. So please, will we try to understand what we are dealing with and recognise that we have done a great injustice?

Then one turns to another argument: that these people are dangerous. If we look objectively at the problems of many of them, they are not. But the test is high, and we have to accept that if we lock someone up for a very long time for an offence that is not that serious, we are likely to do them damage. That is the accepted psychiatric evidence, which those who will not accept that we must do something about this ignore, for a reason I cannot understand. But it is worse than that. Why are these people subjected to increased risk because they have been locked up under this unjust sentence? In all humility—and I do not seek to blame either political party for this—we made a mistake. In the case of the Post Office, we have done justice. In the case of blood transfusion, we have done justice. What is wrong with our system of justice, that we cannot do justice for those we have unjustly imprisoned? It is something to which we have to address our minds. I very much hope that we will have a cross-party solution. I am open to any suggestion, but the action plan is a failure. It will not deliver justice in time, and we must do something different.

There is a fourth important argument. Had any of these offenders who are locked up had the good fortune—and I say good fortune deliberately—to have been sentenced before this sentence came into effect, or to have been sentenced afterwards, they would not be subjected to this horrendous sentence from which they cannot escape. What conceivable justice is there in discriminating against a group of people and refusing to acknowledge our wrong in doing so?

Those arguments are to do with justice, and one would hope that justice is central to this Bill—we call this part of the criminal justice system. However, the Bill is meant, in a sense, to be a utilitarian Bill and one can praise it for that.

We are going to come later this evening to Amendment 122A—how many noble Lords will stay the course is another question—which deals with foreign offenders. We are intending to deport them so that we have prison places. We will not punish them; they can go free. What justice is there in a system that will seek to allow people who are foreign to escape punishment when we cannot look at the utilitarian advantage of releasing from prison some 2,500 people who have either never been released or are back on recall? The justice should be that we will deal with our own people first, free up the prison places, and if someone comes here to assassinate someone or shoplift, or deal in drugs, they should be punished, and we should use the prison places for them.

They are all powerful arguments; I have no vested interest in any solution, but I do have a vested interest in justice, and this Government are not doing justice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords for their helpful comments, which explain why this is such a difficult and important area. We need to keep the public safe, but we also need to keep working as noble Lords to try to do what we can to address this situation.

I welcome the thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, on the importance of supporting IPP offenders.

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

Might I say to the Minister that I set the history of all of this out in a judgment? If only his officials would read it and understand, we would not be in the mess that he has been placed in.

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I will take the noble and learned Lord’s comments away and read that again, but that is also why our quarterly Peers’ meetings on IPP are so important in discussing all these topics.

We must do all that we can to support all IPP prisoners to reduce their risk and progress towards a release decision, but I would not be doing my job to protect the public if they were to be released without the independent Parole Board deciding it is safe to do so. My hope is that every IPP prisoner gets the opportunity to be released and have a successful life in the community, but we need to do that in a way that sets those prisoners up for success in the community. The Government’s view is that any change that removes the protection of the statutory release test is not the right way to do this.

I am aware of criticism of some parts of the IPP action plan, including those raised by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, but it remains my view that the steps we are taking through it are the best way to support this progression. It has contributed to a 10% reduction in the IPP prison population in the 12 months to 30 September 2025. The number of people who have never been released fell by around 14% in the same period. Since the publication of the first action plan in April 2022, the unreleased IPP population has fallen by 39% and is now below 1,000. The focus that I and colleagues have on the IPP action plan means that I need to do more and more work on it, to see where we can add improvements all the way.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Blunkett for his amendments, which seek to allow the Secretary of State to make provision for the automatic re-release of those serving an IPP or DPP sentence who are recalled to prison. My noble friend will be aware of the deep respect I have for his ongoing commitment, drive and tenacity to do all he can to support those serving the IPP sentence. I greatly value his contribution to today’s debate, as well as the thoughtful insights and individual cases he raises with me outside the House.

I appreciate that noble Lords have questioned why we are introducing fixed-term recalls for offenders serving standard determinate sentences but do not accept this change for IPP offenders. There are two crucial differences: the threshold for recall and the level of risk that the offender poses. IPP offenders can be recalled only for behaviour or breaches of their licence that are causally linked to their offending. That is a high bar, and one higher than for recalling prisoners serving standard determinate sentences. I must remind noble Lords what that means in practice: that the Probation Service no longer believes that controls available in the community are sufficient to manage that offender’s risk to keep the public safe, and that the public are therefore at risk of further sexual or violent offending.

A fixed-term recall for IPP offenders would not provide sufficient time for an individual to demonstrate that their risk had reduced, or to receive the required support to reduce their risk, before being automatically re-released. This would put victims and the public at risk. While we will return to the question of recall in more detail later in this debate, I must remind noble Lords that we have built significant safeguards into our fixed-term recall changes. These mean that many offenders who pose a similar risk to IPP offenders recalled to prison are also not eligible for a fixed-term recall.

The Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 introduced a power for the Secretary of State to release recalled IPP prisoners where it is no longer necessary for the protection of the public that they should remain in prison. This is referred to operationally as release after a risk assessed recall review, or RARR. Recalled IPP offenders have already been re-released using this power, when they were due to wait for a number of months before their scheduled oral hearing before the Parole Board.

The revised IPP action plan, published on 17 July this year, now includes a commitment to enable swift re-release following a recall through RARR, where it is safe to do so. This means that HMPPS is considering all IPP offenders recalled for being out of touch, or in relation to allegations of further offences, for RARR, and is trialling an extended referral period to allow more time to consider cases for potential use of RARR before referral to the Parole Board. I respectfully suggest that this power means we already have the ability to do what the noble Lord’s amendment seeks to achieve: a quicker re-release of recalled individuals where it is safe to do so.

I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his amendment, for my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s reflections on it and for their ongoing interest in this important issue. The noble Lord’s amendment seeks to allow a prisoner whose licence is not terminated by the Parole Board at the end of the relevant qualifying period to make an annual application to the Parole Board for consideration of licence termination. The Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 made significant changes to the IPP licence period by reducing the qualifying period for referral to the Parole Board and introducing a provision for automatic licence termination. This automatic provision provides greater certainty to offenders than the annual referrals about when their licence will terminate, which is also important for victims. These changes have resulted in the number of people serving a sentence in the community falling by 65%.

Furthermore, at the four-year point after initial release, if supervision is not suspended or the licence is terminated by the Parole Board at the end of the three-year qualifying period, probation practitioners can further consider applying for suspension of supervision at their own discretion. We must also consider the potential effect on victims of going through an additional Parole Board review just a year after the previous one, but I acknowledge that the noble Lord’s amendment would preserve the role of the Parole Board in this process. I am happy to have further conversations with him and other noble Lords on this point in the coming weeks.

I thank noble Lords for their work on this important issue, and I hope that they are assured not only of the work that we are currently undertaking but of our absolute resolve to make further progress for those serving the IPP sentence. I will continue to work closely with noble Lords and look forward to seeing them at the upcoming round table, and to discussing the points raised between now and Report. I urge noble Lords not to press their amendments.