Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is to abolish indeterminate sentences, known as IPPs or DPPs. IPPs are indeterminate sentences which are imposed on adult criminals; DPPs are sentences imposed on the under-18s. They are very similar in their operation, and I will use IPP as a description to cover both of them. I am delighted to have the support of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who is, of course, an iconic figure in your Lordships’ House. IPPs were created by the Criminal Justice Act 2003. They can be imposed for offences which carry a maximum sentence of at least 10 years but do not provide for life sentences. Ninety-five offences fall into this category. IPPs can be imposed if the criminal has a previous conviction for any one of 153 listed offences. Any such previous conviction creates a presumption that the criminal presents a serious risk of causing future harm to members of the public. Unless that presumption can be rebutted, the criminal who has been convicted of any one of the 95 trigger offences will get an IPP sentence. The sentence will contain a minimum term or tariff. That tariff is the minimum term which the judge hearing the case would have imposed in the absence of IPPs. There is no maximum sentence for an IPP. The statutory upper limit of the sentence for that crime is ignored. For all practical purposes, the IPP is a life sentence, and nothing else. Prisoners’ release requires them not only to have served the tariff in prison, but to have satisfied a panel of the Parole Board that they have reduced the risk that they present to the public. I did not practise in the criminal field when I was at the Bar, but I became aware of the defects of IPPs when I read a report published a year ago by the Chief Inspector of Prisons and the Chief Inspector of Probation. The report is absolutely devastating. It concludes that the courts do not receive accurate pre-sentence reports on the risk of harm when considering whether to impose an IPP and many assessments of risk are, as a consequence, too high. The report concluded that the Parole Board system which determines IPP releases is severely underresourced and, as a result, IPP prisoners languish for months and sometimes years in local prisons because they cannot get the training that they need before they can apply for release. The introduction to the report says: ""Prisoners and staff became increasingly frustrated with their Kafka-esque predicament, unable to access the interventions they needed in order to secure release"." That is the comment of two people who know more about IPPs than anybody else. There has been some improvement as a result of amendments made in 2008 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The amendments exclude from IPPs cases where the tariff would have been for less than two years. In spite of that, the number of IPP prisoners continues to increase steadily. Since the 2003 Act came into force in 2005, more than 5,000 people have been sentenced to IPPs. They now represent about 6 per cent of the total prison population. In September of this year, 1,957 IPP prisoners who had passed the beginning of the minimum tariff date were still held in prison. The number of IPP prisoners who had been released by that time was only 76. That means that only one out of every 25 prisoners eligible for release has in fact been released. Many eligible prisoners have often failed to get release not because their applications have been rejected by a Parole Board panel, but because they have not been able to get access to the board. To make things worse, new Parole Board rules allow the board to refuse an oral hearing and to make decisions based only on paper. The IPP is wrong in principle and wrong in practice. English courts have a long-standing system of sentencing. Under that system, only the most serious offences can be punished by life imprisonment. It is unnecessary and wrong to impose a de facto life sentence on convictions for an offence which does not carry the life sentence. The IPP is even more wrong in practice. It is wrong because many pre-sentence assessments are inadequate and lead to the imposition of IPPs on those who should not be subject to it. It is wrong because many IPP prisoners, especially in local prisons, have no access to training, without which they cannot get a hearing before a Parole Board panel. IPPs are wrong because the Parole Board is overstretched and underfunded, leading to long delays in hearings. Putting those defects right would cost a large amount of money, which will plainly not be available in a time of financial crisis, but not correcting the defects in the system is also expensive, because IPP prisoners remain in prison after they should have been released. I should explain how my amendment works. Of course, it stops the future imposition of any further indeterminate sentences. For those who have already received indeterminate sentences, it will not be practicable to reconsider in every case what would have been the appropriate sentence for those who are currently on IPPs. The amendment would bring an IPP to an end if the prisoner has not been released at the end of the maximum term for which the sentence could have been imposed in the absence of indeterminate sentences. As the maximum term cannot be less than 10 years, there would be few, if any, immediate releases as a result of the amendment becoming law. However, the IPP prisoners would then have a definite date for the end of their sentence. That would be helpful, because indeterminate sentences damage the mental condition of prisoners. Many believe that they will never get out and lose the incentive to do so. I am aware of the understandable public concern about the successful appeal of the prisoner in the Baby P case against an indeterminate sentence, but I do not believe that that presents any relevance to the amendment. IPP is a failure. Worse, it is an expensive failure. It keeps people in prison who should have been released. It involves spending money on court hearings and on the work of the Parole Board and the Probation Service. The obvious remedy would be to get rid of the IPP and get rid of what have been described as its Kafka-esque consequences, and the sooner the better. I beg to move.