My Lords, because of the quality and content of the speeches already made this afternoon, I hope I can be quite brief. I begin by declaring an interest as a trustee of the Prison Reform Trust and by commending the report that the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, just mentioned: No Life, No Freedom, No Future, the title of which brilliantly encapsulates the Kafkaesque state of affairs that we see when we consider IPPs. I also briefly thank Frances Crook, the retiring director of the Howard League, for all the work she did and for trying over the years to improve and inform the debate about what goes on in our prisons.
Our prisons are a secret world. When I was a Member of Parliament I once explained to a local journalist that I thought that all prisons should of course have walls to keep the prisoners in and to protect the public from the prisoners. However, all these prison walls should have windows in them so that the public could see in and learn what is being done on their behalf inside these prisons, but also so that the prisoners could see through those windows out into the world and into society, to see that if things went well for them and if their life, educational and employment prospects were improved by what they were doing and learning in prison, there was a world out there waiting to welcome them back. The journalist said, “Have you considered the public expenditure implications of building all these windows in those walls?” It is occasionally possible to lose the will to live when discussing something as complex as the state of our prisons.
Where it is not necessary to lose the will to live is when one listens to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, explaining and accepting—very publicly and bravely—that he got it wrong in the early part of his time as Home Secretary. I congratulate him. Most former Home Secretaries—most politicians—spend their post-government life rewriting history. This former Home Secretary has accepted that he got it wrong—I thank him for it—and he is now trying to assist us in getting it right again. I also congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, on following on that particular train of thought. It behoves all of us in this Chamber, whether we are interested in this subject directly or indirectly, to mend this problem, and it is a problem
that needs mending. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, describes IPPs as the greatest stain on our justice system, and he is entirely right. However, it is a stain that we can remove.
I tabled Amendment 208E and have co-signed Amendments208F and 208G, but I could have co-signed any of these amendments. I simply want to see IPPs abolished. I want to see all those who are on IPPs at the moment either released under supervision or transferred to some other form of more humane sentence which gives those people hope, a life, an aspiration of freedom and a future which they can aspire to. At the minute, they are literally hopeless.
Some 14 or 15 years ago, when I was shadow Minister for Prisons in the other place when the Conservative Party was in opposition, I made a point in that job of visiting as many of the prisons in our system in England and Wales as I possibly could. There were then about 140 or 145 institutions—adult male prisons, adult female prisons, YOIs and secure training units—and I think I managed to get to about 70 or 75 of them. On a number of occasions I visited prisons where there were IPP prisoners, and the governors universally said, “This cohort of prisoners is the most difficult to manage because they have no hope.” They did not know when they were going to be released or whether they were going to be there for ever or whether they might be released in a year or two’s time. They had no idea which it was going to be.
One of the reasons I tabled Amendment 208E is that proposed new subsection (2) of that amendment describes the things within prison which are hopeless and entirely damaging to a fair justice system. Amendment 208E is one of several “six month report” amendments—I say in parenthesis that Amendment 208F is the one to go for if we are to do anything of a positive nature this evening. Amendment 208E, along with others of these “six month report” amendments, describes what is wrong with the system as it currently is. It asks
“whether there are sufficient places available for prisoners serving sentences of IPP on offending behaviour programmes”.
No, there are not. It asks
“whether prisoners serving sentences of IPP are able to complete offending behaviour programmes in appropriate time to aid progression milestones such as parole or recategorization”.
No, they cannot do that. You may be queuing up for a course while you are in, let us say, Maidstone Prison, and then you are churned—moved to another prison—so you will go to the back of the queue, or moved to a prison which does not have the relevant people to lead you on that particular course. Your mental and physical health records take months to follow you to your prison, and when they arrive and when the new governor or the new teaching staff of that prison to which you have been sent catch up with your request—guess what? You are moved to a prison in Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool or somewhere else. It is a hopeless state of affairs, and we should have done something about it years ago.
It follows that there are not sufficient places available for prisoners serving sentences of IPP in prisons providing progression regimes, for the practical reasons I have just pointed out. Is there availability of other opportunities for prisoners serving IPP sentences to enable them to progress and demonstrate reduced risk, particularly
for those who have completed opportunities afforded to them by offending behaviour programmes and progression regimes? Of course not; it is a shambles—a cruel shambles.
Even on what I call ordinary life sentences, prisoners can do a particular course to demonstrate that, before long, they may become suitable for release on licence. However, if they do them within the first two or three years of their imprisonment, then remain in prison for another 14 or 15 years, all that they may have learned on that course all that time ago has long been forgotten, and all the people who have supervised them in prison have no corporate memory of what prisoner A, B or C learned all those years ago. So when they are reassessed after having completed the tariff, they fail the assessment. Can they get on a course again? Of course not. They are told, “You’ve been on one already. You’ll have to wait your turn, after all the other people”. The simple, practical organisation in our prisons is not fit to cope with this troubled and troubling group of prisoners on IPPs.
I will end on this point. The thing that a convicted defendant on sentence wants to hear is not a moralising judge telling them that they have behaved very badly and must never do it again, but the number—that is, how long they are going inside for. When they are sentenced to an IPP and hear the tariff of two or five or 10 years, that is the number that sticks in their mind among all the noise and clatter that is going on in their heads and in the courtroom. It is only when they get into the prison van—the sweat box—or get to the prison for their first reception that it dawns on them that the sentence does not mean two years; it means for ever unless they can do something to help themselves. Of course, because of the lack of availability of the factors that I have just addressed, it is almost impossible for that prisoner to help himself to improve, to see some chance of release and to come out as a better citizen again.
This obscenity must now end. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister and his government colleagues have it within them to do that, and I am sure that they will.