Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-12-15
Topic: Law and Crime
Simon Denis Brown (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, in speaking only to Amendment 80, I mention that I also support Amendment 81 in this group. Amendment 80 is the one amendment in this entire Bill that could reduce—if only by a tiny fraction—the prison population, which most of this Bill is, of course, calculated to enlarge. More directly and importantly, it would go some small way towards ending a long-standing and ever-growing injustice, now recognised by many as the greatest single stain on our criminal justice system with regard to the cohort of IPP prisoners Amendment 80 applies only to some of the 1,700 or so IPP prisoners still in prison after the abolition of the whole discredited scheme nine years ago by LASPO. The amendment applies just to two categories within the 1,700: those who have now served more than 10 years beyond the tariff sentence—in other words, more than 10 years over the proper punishment for their offending —and those who have now served more than the statutory maximum determinate sentence prescribed by law for their offence. For these people this is manifestly preventive detention—frankly, it is internment by another name Your Lordships may like to know that, of the 570 IPP prisoners who have served more than 10 years beyond tariff, 200 had tariffs of less than two years and another 326 had two-to-four-year tariffs, so only very few—44—had more than four years. Your Lordships may also like to know that the UK has more indeterminate sentence prisoners, lifers and those on IPP, than any other of the 47 countries in the Council of Europe including Turkey and Russia Unlike life sentence prisoners, who are serving life for the gravity of the crimes they have actually committed, IPP prisoners are there simply for what they might do in future—what, in short, they cannot prove to the satisfaction of the Parole Board that they would not do on release. The uncertainty, hopelessness, utter despair and sheer misery of the prisoners and their families need no emphasis. It is small wonder that there have been many suicides and that the rates of self-harm among these prisoners are more than twice that of life sentence prisoners In urging this amendment, I stress the essential modesty of the proposal. It is purely a reversal of the burden of proof. It still leaves the public protected against those who can be shown to be dangerous. If the prison authority responsible for their continued incarceration, with all the various reports from prison staff, medics and so forth, can still show that the prisoner would pose an unacceptable risk on release, then they will not get out. The amendment goes nothing like as far as many would wish and think appropriate When the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, who, alas, is not in his place, abolished this scheme in 2012, I understand he wanted to abolish it retrospectively as well as prospectively but was not permitted to do so. Michael Gove, after ceasing to be Lord Chancellor. recognised the intrinsic injustice in the Longford lecture. Matthew Parris recently wrote in the Times how the Government need the guts to reassess these cases I end, as I did in Committee, with this question: suppose one of these IPP prisoners with a tariff of a one-year sentence representing his criminality, is more than 10 years beyond that and still unable to discharge the burden of showing the Parole Board that he can be safely released without risk. What should happen? Should he remain incarcerated for another five, 10 or 20 years, or do we as a nation accept lifelong internment for this group? I hope not.