Coroners and Justice Bill

I support the amendment, to which I readily put my name, because I could not agree more with every word that the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, has spoken, not least the tribute that he quite rightly paid to my successor, Dame Anne Owers, who has been a most distinguished Chief Inspector of Prisons. As the noble Lord said, the report that she and the Chief Inspector of Probation produced is an absolutely devastating indictment of an appallingly ill-thought-through, ill-considered, expensive and inefficient introduction, which resulted in a grossly overstated, knee-jerk reaction to what was alleged to be a problem. What the noble Lord did not mention was that at about the same time another devastating indictment of IPP was published by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, which reported in great detail on the results of the imposition of IPP sentences on people, not least on their families, who looked up what an IPP meant on the internet and saw that it meant a sentence of not less than 96 years. How stupid can we be? The only stupider sentence that I have come across was in the Cayman Islands, where I found a man who had been sentenced to life plus 56 years. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, has quite rightly run through the figures. When this IPP was suggested, it was felt that it would apply to a few people—hundreds at the very most. The fact that the policy was not thought through was proved almost immediately by the acceleration of the figures to a level that is now totally and utterly unmanageable. What has always seemed totally extraordinary in a grossly overcrowded and under-resourced prison system is that the Prison Service and the Ministers responsible for it have not asked themselves what the cost of this is in terms of their budget. There are thousands of prisoners who have been in prison for far longer than they should, and because of the nature of their alleged offence, they are held in the highest security prisons, at a cost of £65,000 a year each. Surely it stands to reason that if you do not have resources, you should look at the problem and decide what in your structure you can afford to cut and, therefore, produce the money that you need to do what has to be done with prisoners who have to be in prison. Prisoners have already successfully taken the Ministry of Justice to court because they have not been provided with the courses to enable them to qualify to go to probation to be released and, therefore, there is a sort of revolving circle inside a revolving door. When is it going to come to an end? If you cannot prove that you can be released, you will be there for ever. If more and more IPP prisoners are added, and there are less and less resources to deal with them, you are totally unnecessarily choking the system. The only way out of this IPP problem is to acknowledge that it was a hideous mistake and that before the IPP was introduced checks and balances existed in the system whereby if a prisoner was sentenced to life imprisonment—whatever the tariff was—the risk that they represented determined the time of their release. The people who really need to be kept away from the public can be assessed in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, recognised and can be monitored by the prison authorities to make certain that they are released only when that risk is such that release is warranted. There should not be more than 5,000 people in the prison system whose risk is sufficiently serious to warrant the sort of procedures that are currently being applied to some people whose sentences are as short as 38 days. How can you have an indeterminate sentence based on a 38-day sentence? It is ludicrous. If the Government really are serious about rehabilitating prisoners, they should make certain that the resources are there to do it and are not wasted on a system which is costing money for no good purpose and with no outcome for the prisoners in the system. I could not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, more strongly.