Prison Reform

Lord Woolf Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Corston (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Woolf (CB)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry, but if we are going strictly in turn, it is the turn of the Labour Benches. However, I know that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, has been trying to get in. Therefore, if we go next to Labour, I suggest that we then go to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf.

[Lord Faulks]

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness’s contribution to reducing the population of women prisoners and her concern for them. Of course, she will be pleased that their number is lower than it has been for a decade. We hope that we can reproduce the best practice found in Holloway—albeit it is closing—and in the women’s centres in making sure that the arrangements in prison are those best suited for women and their rehabilitation.

[Lord Woolf]

My Lords, is it not right that the inflation in sentences—they are longer than they have ever been—is caused by action taken by Governments, and not by judges, to impose fixed sentences? These sentences form rocks that the rest of sentencing has to accommodate. If that were not the case, sentences would be shorter, because judges are prevented from imposing the sentences that they otherwise would by the fixed-sentencing policies of the Government of a particular time.

[Lord Faulks]

I am grateful for the contribution made by the noble and learned Lord. Of course, this Government and the coalition Government before them were very much against fixed sentences. It was the coalition Government who repealed, for example, provision in relation to indeterminate sentences for public protection. In the eight criminal justice Acts that were passed by the Labour Government, extraordinary inflexibility was given to judges in passing sentences—that is one of the results in terms of the prison population. We are endeavouring to give as many resources as we can to the Parole Board to make sure that those prisoners will be released when it is safe to do so.