Coroners and Justice Bill

I am delighted that Amendment 191A is supported by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I am quite surprised to find myself moving this amendment because my practice when I was a barrister was entirely in the civil field and not at all in the criminal field. However, I became interested in this point when, in September of last year, a report on indeterminate sentences was published by the Chief Inspector of Prisons and the Chief Inspector of Probation. It is one of the most devastating reports that I have ever read. I do not know the Chief Inspector of Probation but I have known the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers, for many years. I worked with her for a number of years when she was the director of Justice and I was the chair of its executive committee. People generally have the highest regard for her. I have absolute confidence that anything she writes is the truth. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 created the indeterminate sentence for public protection, or IPP. It also created a similar sentence of detention for public protection, or DPP, which could be imposed on young people under the age of 18. These two types of sentence are very similar and, for convenience, I will mainly refer to both as IPP. The purpose of an IPP is to enable the courts to override the normal sentencing powers and impose an unlimited or indeterminate sentence on criminals who have been convicted of serious offences—mainly violent or sexual ones—and who appear, or are thought, to pose significant risk of serious harm in the future. Ninety-five different offences were included in the list of potentially serious offences, conviction for which could trigger an IPP. The IPP can, however, be applied only if the criminal has at least one previous conviction, but that previous conviction could be for one of 153 different offences—not just the 95 that could trigger the IPP, but 58 lesser offences, including affray or criminal damage. Any such previous conviction creates a presumption that there is a serious risk of future harm. An IPP sentence contains a tariff which sets out the minimum time that must be served by the prisoner. The prisoner’s release, however, is dependent not only on their having served their tariff, but on satisfying the Parole Board that they have reduced the risk that they present to the public. If release is granted, it is on licence. An IPP is therefore, in many ways, similar to a life sentence. IPPs came into effect in April 2005. By the end of 2006, more than 2,000 prisoners had received IPPs. By the end of 2007, 3,700 prisoners were IPP prisoners. It is estimated that 13 per cent—nearly 500—of these prisoners were by then beyond their minimum tariff. It is estimated that the number of IPP prisoners is increasing by 150 per month. As of February of this year, according to figures published by the Criminal Justice Alliance, there were more than 5,000 IPP prisoners. Some 1,487 were already beyond their minimum tariff, but as of four weeks earlier, only 47 of these prisoners had been released on licence. That amounts to only 3 per cent of those who had already passed beyond their tariff. In September 2008 the report of the two chief inspectors was published. It points out the fundamental defects of the IPP system. First, the report pointed out that it is essential, if justice is to be done, for the court—before it sentences a prisoner—to have before it accurate reports assessing the extent of the serious risk of harm. The report concluded that many of the assessments were too high and that the courts had not been given sufficient information to guide their decisions. The part of the report on probation input states: ""Inspectors examined a sample of 48 cases of adult men, young adults and women sentenced to IPPs, to see whether pre-sentence reports (PSRs) properly addressed risk in order to assist the sentencing court. There had been little guidance to probation staff in carrying out this role. Inspectors found … Of the 45 cases with pre-sentence reports, fewer than half were informed by a full and accurately completed assessment of current and previous offending behaviour … Of those cases, 31 (over two-thirds) had at least one diverse need, such as mental health, substance misuse, ethnicity or learning difficulties. In only 14 cases did the report demonstrate an understanding of the relevance of the need to the offending or future risk … Of the 40 cases which had a risk of harm analysis, only half were judged to have given sufficient consideration to risk issues. Inspectors disagreed with the classification in 17 cases, judging it to be inflated in 16 (40% of cases) … Overall, the quality of the risk of harm assessment was not sufficient to assist the courts adequately in deciding whether to impose an IPP sentence"." There is a lot more material which is equally condemning of the machinery by which IPPs are administered. Once IPP has been imposed, the Parole Board will expect prisoners to have undergone relevant offender behaviour programmes before they can be released on licence. The arrangement for training is hopelessly inadequate, especially in local prisons, where no relevant training is available and which house hundreds of IPP prisoners. The size of the case load of the Parole Board increased by one-third in the first two years of IPP. That leads to great delays in listing and hearing, not least because, according to the report, only 38 per cent of dossiers arrive on time. The report of the inspectors does not propose that IPP and DPP should be abolished. However, it is impossible to read that report without coming to the conclusion that abolition must be seriously considered. IPP has turned out to be both extremely expensive to the state and unjust to many prisoners, keeping prisoners in jail beyond the tariff period because release is delayed by inaccurate pre-sentencing reports, by the absence of proper training and by delays in access to the Parole Board. It is plainly a waste of public money and unjust to the prisoners, but the cost of remedying the defects would be enormous. It would need thorough and effective pre-sentencing reports on risks presented by those who are potentially subject to IPP. It would need proper offender behaviour programmes for all IPP prisoners and ensuring that all such prisoners should be allocated to prisons where the programmes are available. The status quo is simply not acceptable, but I do not believe that, at a time of cutbacks in public spending, we would be justified in spending many millions on improvements to a scheme which might well not succeed in reducing crime at all. We should recognise that IPP and DPP are costing the Ministry of Justice money which would be better spent elsewhere and are keeping prisoners in jail who should not be there. IPP and DPP are experiments that have failed and should be brought to an end. For those already serving IPP and DPP sentences, those sentences should be replaced by the maximum sentence for the offence for which they have been convicted. The minimum tariff period would continue to be the same as at present. This is a serious condemnation of our prison system and the time has come for us seriously to consider abolition. The Government should abolish the indeterminate sentence now and keep it abolished. I beg to move.