Prison Capacity

Richard Foord Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

I thank my right hon. Friend; no one did more in government to ensure that serious foreign national offenders were on planes getting out of the country. She did an exceptional job and I pay tribute to her for that.

On public protection, the whole point of the suspended sentence order is that the magistrate will say to the individual, “The crime that you’ve committed crosses the custody threshold. I am going to impose a suspended sentence order, potentially with a curfew and unpaid work”—or whatever the other conditions are. That order is then a sword of Damocles hanging over the person. If they do not comply, they are brought back before the court and they serve that sentence in custody. The choice for that offender is very clear: do what they should and abide by the order of the court, or they will hear the clang of the prison gates.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

As Home Secretary, Lord David Blunkett introduced indeterminate imprisonment for public protection sentences. Lord Blunkett has since said that he regrets injustices caused by the awarding of those IPP sentences. In February this year, 372 of the 2,456 women serving sentences in prison were serving indeterminate sentences. How many women are still serving IPP sentences who have already served their full tariff?

[Alex Chalk]

The hon. Gentleman is right, and I remember when IPPs came in; they were created by the Criminal Justice Act 2003. I was a barrister at the time and I remember that under the legislation we were required effectively to apply for them and that judges were required to hand them down. There has been an understanding, in the intervening 20 years, that they have not operated as they should. They have created a sense of total despair, hopelessness and, most importantly of all, injustice.

How we deal with this issue is difficult in circumstances where the Parole Board has judged that people remain a danger to society. That is the issue. There is no easy solution where we say simply, “Let people out”, because we know in doing so that they could commit crimes and harm our fellow citizens. So we cannot do that, but what we will do is take every step, including providing additional psychological support so that individuals can prepare for parole hearings, and we will look at the issue of licences. We will not compromise on public safety, but we will do everything we can to scrub out the stain of those misguided sentences.