Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 52: 52: Clause 13, page 9, leave out lines 41 and 42 The noble Lord said: My Lords, Amendment No. 52 brings us to IPPs, which will also be the subject of later groupings. Before I introduce the amendment, I make it clear to your Lordships that I entirely accept that there is a real problem with IPPs and prison place availability. If you are in prison as a result of receiving an IPP and have served your minimum term, you cannot, as your Lordships well know, get out without having been through a period of rehabilitation and having demonstrated that you have—at least, to some degree—benefited from it. As we all know, the current situation in prisons is such that it is simply not possible to initiate rehabilitation schemes which meet the requirements of the law. As a result, there is growing frustration among prisoners who have received IPPs about their inability to have the opportunity to improve their lot. The problem is now deeply ingrained in all the associated difficulties of prison resources. Indeed, at the end of the Committee stage debate, the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, raised a very interesting question about the compatibility of the current state of prisons with the European Convention on Human Rights. His second point was that, if someone is awarded an IPP, what goes with it is a right to be rehabilitated. If that right is in practice, as he put it, a fiction, is that a denial of someone’s human rights under the convention? That question was posed at the end of Committee and I should be most interested to know whether the Minister has managed to reflect on it between then and now. Perhaps I may introduce this matter again very briefly, because we had a long debate about it in Committee. As your Lordships are very well aware, the conditions for imposing an IPP are that, first, the crime must be one of 153 specified sexual or violent offences; secondly, the offence must be capable of attracting a sentence of 10 or more years of imprisonment; and, thirdly, the offender must pose a significant risk of causing death or serious injury by the commission of further offences. In such cases, the judge must impose an IPP and the offender must serve a minimum tariff before he can be considered for release; but, as I have already indicated, he can be held in custody for as long as he is considered to pose a threat to public security. The most recent figures indicate that at least half of all sentences given for threats to kill, child sex offences and sexual assault resulted in a tariff of less than two years. That means that, if the Government press ahead with their plans, those individuals will not be eligible for IPPs, given that their sentence length would be below the threshold that is to be introduced. I quite understand the convenience to the Government of seeking to legislate in that way, but judges sentence individuals to IPPs because they believe that they are dangerous. The assessment of danger is quite independent of the length of the sentence of imprisonment that judges give for the offence charged. They are not connected but are completely different exercises. Desirable though it may be to relieve the pressures of the IPP system, it should not be done by undermining the assessment of a judge that a particular person should receive an IPP because he represents a real threat. I repeat, the judge has to undertake two completely different exercises. On the one hand, there is the sentencing exercise and, on the other, the assessment of whether the individual is capable of being a threat to society. This is what we complain of. Whether the tariff is below or above two years, the judge faces exactly the same problem in either case. I beg to move.