My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, for moving his amendment. I have tabled Amendment 156; it may be convenient to speak to it now. Before doing so, I have some general points to make about the whole issue of IPP, which I will not repeat in detail later.
I am grateful for all the work that my noble friend Lord Moylan has done along with the Prison Reform Trust and UNGRIPP. In 2017, as a result of a debate initiated by the late noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood—I am grateful for the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti —I decided to take a very close look at our penal system. I soon found that I needed to widen my interest to the whole of the criminal justice system because there is so much is wrong with it. One obvious example is joint enterprise murder, but that is for another day.
Let no one think that I am some sort of soft, bleeding heart, out-of-touch do-gooder. I am not. I believe in firm discipline, with all that that implies. But—I repeat, but—no more disciplinary sanctions should be applied,
including incarceration, than are needed to have the desired, legitimate effects of protecting the public by incapacitation, and providing retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation. The current IPP regime clearly fails this test on all counts. I will not rehearse the heart-rending histories that we have all heard about. They are not in dispute.
I also accept that some prisoners on an IPP sentence may not be releasable any time soon even under a resentencing scheme. However, keeping prisoners incarcerated unnecessarily costs £44,000 per annum per prisoner and wastes resources. We know we have a terrible prison system because the Chief Inspector of Prisons tell us that is so. In his 2023 report, he said that inspectors have run out of superlatives to describe how poor the purposeful activity component of prison life is, or words to that effect. No wonder IPP prisoners find it so hard to demonstrate any progress with rehabilitation.
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We have undertaken almost no noticeable reform of our prison system since the proposals made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in the early 1990s. My noble friend the Minister may point to some incremental improvements, but they would not be something that even a well-informed member of the public would be aware of.
I support all the IPP amendments that have been tabled to the Bill. We really do have to do something to solve this problem, no matter how difficult that might be. As the noble and learned Lord said, something must be done.
I do understand the difficulty that the Opposition Front Bench finds itself in. However, I think that we have to be clear that the determining factor is a policy set by the shadow Secretary of State in another place. I would happily vote for any of the proposed amendments if supported by the Opposition Front Bench, but I can understand the fear arising from the possibility that a released IPP offender might commit a further offence and it might be a serious one. But the fact is that we are often releasing offenders knowing that there is a high probability of them reoffending. That is why I have made my proposals for dealing with young prolific minor offenders, which I keep bending your Lordships’ ears about in private.
I turn to my Amendment 156. Clause 48 deals with the termination of licences for release, as we have heard. My amendment totally removes the power of the Secretary of State to alter the qualifying period by statutory instrument. Of course, I would be content with the proposal to allow the Secretary of State only to reduce, as suggested by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, in his Amendment 157. It is not clear to me why this provision in Clause 48 is necessary or desirable. Suitable criminal justice Bills come to your Lordships’ House with monotonous regularity and any one could be used to effect a change if desired. Can my noble friend the Minister suggest in what circumstances it might be necessary to alter the qualifying period because, presumably, this IPP problem is going to be solved quite quickly—or is it not really?
It is also quite a palaver to secure an affirmative order; it is not that simple and there are a lot of processes to be gone through. Also, it would require a one-hour
debate in your Lordships’ House. Assuming any change was desirable, it might be simpler to use a suitable Bill to effect any change needed.