My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble and leaned friend, Lord Lloyd, for his tireless pursuit of this particular issue, which amounts to nothing less than a stain on our national reputation for observing the rule of law. More than that, as a former Chief Inspector of Prisons, I am most surprised that the Secretary of State, who is faced with enormous financial problems in the management of his prisons, should not be seeking every possible way of getting out of the prisons the people who should not be there. That is an avoidable expense, and I have said this over and over again.
Furthermore, as the Minister knows, the prisons do not have sufficient resources to provide the means by which these people can prove their right to be released to the Parole Board. Only last year, I reported to the House a most tragic case of an IPP prisoner who had already been in prison for more than three years after his tariff and was sent to a prison where he would receive the course that he required in order to satisfy the Parole Board, only to be told that not only did that prison not have the course, but it was not intending to do so for two years; so he committed suicide. He is not the only IPP prisoner to have taken his own life because of his despair of the Government exercising their obligations, which have been so clearly deployed by the noble and learned Lord, and observing this country’s reputation for observation of the rule of law.