My hon. Friend is right, but it is important to note that in every case a proper risk assessment must be made to ensure that only the right people find themselves in open prisons.
Currently, in most cases, the decision whether to move a prisoner to open conditions is made after advice has been sought from the Parole Board. The hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) referred to
the burden on the board that the Bill will create. We must indeed ensure that the board has the necessary resources, and we will do that. Public protection is the priority, as all Members would expect it to be, and the Parole Board takes account of a range of factors when assessing whether the risk posed by an offender has been reduced enough for that offender to be managed in open conditions, or on licence in the community. Those factors might include the completion of offence-related courses, a sustained period of good custodial behaviour, access to appropriate and stable accommodation, access to education, training and employment—as was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) —and support from professionals, as well as from family and friends. Offenders are returned to closed conditions if their behaviour in open conditions, or updated risk assessments completed in open conditions, indicates an unacceptable risk to the public.
My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley was also rightly concerned about absconding. Prisons can and do take a variety of actions to try to reduce its incidence. Open prisons operate intelligence systems with the aim of spotting those who might be planning to abscond. Prisoners are screened, and those who are at significant risk of absconding are sent back to closed conditions. Absconders can be criminally charged, and prisons, police and the Crown Prosecution Service are increasingly working together to secure their successful prosecution, which can act as a deterrent to others—as can the increased penalties for which the Bill provides.
New clause 42 seeks to ensure that no prisoner serving a life sentence can be moved to a category D prison before the views of the victim or the victim’s family have been sought and considered. Here I hope that I can offer my hon. Friend some reassurance. We have recently taken steps to enhance the rights to which victims are entitled under the statutory probation victim contact scheme, which covers all victims of serious sexual and violent offences when the offender has received a prison sentence of 12 months or more. Under the scheme, victims already have the right to submit a victim personal statement to the Parole Board when the board is considering whether to direct the release or a move to open conditions of a life sentence prisoner. That allows victims to explain the impact that the offence has had on them, and what the impact of a move to open conditions, or release, would be. Victims have a right to make representations about release conditions attached to an offender's licence, and that includes temporary release from open prison. When there are any concerns about the vulnerability of the victim, the victim can feed into the licence conditions by, for instance, requesting an exclusion zone in the area where they live or work.
New clauses 37 and 38 seek to prevent prisoners liable for deportation from being moved to an open prison or released on temporary licence. When a prisoner is being removed from the United Kingdom directly from prison, a move to open conditions or a temporary release will not serve its key resettlement purposes. That point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole. However, in cases in which the prisoner, although liable to deportation, is not actually deported but is resettled here on release from the sentence, the positive benefits of open conditions and temporary release would, if the new clauses were passed, be lost.
Our current policy seeks as far as possible to ensure that those who will be removed from the UK stay in closed conditions, and that those who will not can be considered for transfer to open conditions and temporary release. In such cases, as my hon. Friend would expect, particular care is taken to ensure that the risk assessment takes into account the potential of removal.
When decisions are made about transfer to open conditions or temporary release, Home Office staff will be consulted so that any information relevant to the risk assessment process can be obtained. That includes the likelihood of removal action, history of failure to comply with immigration conditions, previous absconds, any history of deception with the aim of entering or remaining in the UK or evading removal, and any failure to comply with the directions of the Home Office. We are actively reviewing our policy to ensure that it can meet those aims, but we are satisfied that a statutory ban on the transfer to open conditions or temporary release for every prisoner liable to deportation would not be in the interests of reducing reoffending.
My hon. Friend expressed concern about the use of temporary release. New clause 40 would prevent any prisoner serving a sentence for murder from being released on temporary licence. Temporary release contributes to public protection and reducing reoffending by helping those who are due to be released to prepare for life outside prison. For prisoners serving an indeterminate sentence, it also provides evidence for the Parole Board of how an offender complies when in the community. Making this change would lead to offenders who had rightly been away from ordinary society for years being suddenly removed from a strictly regulated regime where most decisions are made for them into the community where they will make most decisions for themselves. Temporary release allows this transition to take place gradually, using short releases, over many months, for the impact of each temporary release to be assessed over this time, and for the risk management plan to be tailored accordingly, while the offender is still in custody.
We have already acted to ensure that public protection is placed at the heart of the temporary release scheme. Changes were made to risk assessment requirements last year following three serious incidents involving temporary release, and on 10 March we announced a package of measures to further improve decision making, monitoring and enforcement of the thankfully rare temporary release failures. To reassure my hon. Friend, I should put this into context for him. There are about half a million releases on temporary licence every year: roughly 0.1% of them result in a failure of any kind and a much smaller proportion of that small proportion involve the suspicion of further offences. None the less, we take all those failures very seriously and we intend to do something about them.
Specifically, from the autumn we will have a new scheme of restricted release on temporary licence for serious offenders. In those cases, there will be more stringent risk assessment procedures, with greater involvement of psychology and probation professionals and more restrictive licence conditions involving probation professionals. As soon as suitable equipment is available, we will be able to tag offenders on temporary release, and we intend to do so. Improving risk assessment and management in individual cases is the right response to concerns about temporary release; a blanket ban on all
offenders serving a sentence for murder would be counter-productive. As other Members have said in this debate, this is about a balance of risks. For all those who are released from custody—the vast majority of those serving sentences—it is important to reduce the risk of reoffending as much as we can, and many of the things we have talked about in this debate help to do that.