Baroness Chakrabarti:

Moved by Baroness Chakrabarti

155: Clause 48, page 52, line 23, after ““three”;” insert “and(ii) at end insert “in the case of a person serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection and one and a half years beginning with the date of his release in the case of a person serving a sentence of detention for public protection.”;”Member's explanatory statementThis amendment would halve the qualifying period for men and women who were sentenced as children in line with other statutory provisions, such as when convictions become “spent”, to reflect the principle that children change in a shorter period than adults.

My Lords, once more, I rise to move the lead amendment in the group in place of my noble friend Lord Blunkett. I think we can take this group with some speed, which will not diminish the power of his arguments or these amendments. These amendments concern men and women who were sentenced to indeterminate detention when they were children. Their sentence is called “detention for public protection”. All the arguments we have been airing in earlier groups are, to my mind, turbocharged in the context of these people—all the injustices are so much worse given that they were children when these appalling sentences were placed upon them.

The amendments seek to recognise our contemporary understanding of child development and to legislate with the according enlightenment and humanity. Amendment 155 halves the qualifying period before release eligibility to one and a half years. Amendment 162 ensures quarterly, instead of annual, progression planning reviews to avoid this cohort becoming stuck in the system and to recognise that, when one is younger, one develops at a different rate. One develops for longer than we used to think and at a swifter rate, including positively, we hope than would be expected of fully mature adults who have committed crimes. Amendment 163 requires the Secretary of State to refer these prisoners—because that is effectively what they are—to the Parole Board annually for enhanced scrutiny.

All of this prioritises this cohort and adds extra pressure on scrutiny and nudging things along to make sure that, if at all possible, they might be released. Not a single one of these amendments would change the basis for release. Regarding the difficulties that the Minister was reaching for in earlier groups, not a single one of these amendments would put a single person on the street. But, given the age at which they were sentenced and the increased injustice of that sentence, it would give closer and more regular scrutiny to their progression through the system—hopefully, towards release.

Finally, I declare an interest in that, for most of the last three years, I have had the privilege of serving under the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who was the founding chair of your Lordships’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee. I have recently rotated off that committee in favour, I am glad to say, of my noble friend Lord Bach, who will no doubt be a wonderful addition to that committee. The last report from that committee when I served on it, again under the chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was about community sentencing versus incarceration. In their lengthy response, in paragraph 90 regarding young people, the Government said:

“All offenders are legally treated as adults from the age of 18, however there is powerful evidence which shows that young adults continue their psychosocial maturity development well into their mid-twenties. Recognising this evidence, the Ministry of Justice and HMPPS is committed to developing approaches and support to meet young adults’ distinctive maturity and developmental needs while ensuring public protection”.

That was the Government’s position very recently—as of weeks ago. It is my suggestion to the Committee that that ethos fuels these amendments.

Therefore, the Government should have no difficulty, given the age of these people when sentenced, in accepting these amendments or some version of them. As I said, not a single person will walk the streets as a result of these amendments, but they will get extra support and scrutiny which is appropriate for people who were sentenced to indeterminate sentence when they were children.

My Lords, I have added my name to all the amendments in this group, initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and so well presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti.

While I have made my feelings clear on many occasions on just how egregious the treatment of all IPP prisoners has been, the situation for individuals sentenced as children has been arguably even more cruel and wrong. As I understand it, there are 85 people currently serving an IPP sentence that was handed down when they were children and some were of a very young age.

The teen years are such a formative time, and of the 85 remaining—who are now all adults—they have arguably had the worst start in life; 36 of them have never been released. What chance have they got of adjusting back into whatever might pass as a normal life? The only upside of this is that, because there are not that many of them, more time and attention can therefore be focused on fitting them for release.

According to the Prison Reform Trust, there is a window in which people typically develop the support and inner resources to desist from crime. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has said, this unfortunate cohort is rapidly passing that window, which means that giving them the maximum possible support as quickly as possible is vital.

Amendment 155 would halve the qualifying period in which other statutory provisions for children become spent. Amendment 162 would give heavier support to DPPs who are unsuccessful in staying on parole or getting released at all. My worry about changing sentence planning reviews from annually to quarterly, however, is that if nothing has happened it might devalue the relevance of the review and dishearten the prisoner.

Amendment 163 would halve the time between referrals for consideration by the Parole Board to one year, which I heartily commend. The issue for me is the cost in financial and human resources, to which the Minister might want to refer. The only upside of this concentrated help is the fact that there are not many DPPs in terms of the overall cost that is being expended on IPP prisoners.

If these young people are to have a real chance, they need the help now, while their mind and their development can still be receptive to another way of living their life.

My Lords, I would like to add a few words to what has already been said about Amendments 162 and 163 devised by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. The really important part of Amendment 162 is in proposed new subsection (2), which would set out in statute the aim of the convenor of these planning meetings. It states that they are taking place

“with a view to ensuring that all possible steps are taken to enable their safe release at the earliest possible time”.

Those words emphasise the purpose of the reviews and therefore enhance the care that would be taken to conduct them by the Secretary of State.

As far as Amendment 163 is concerned, the first part of it is already the existing law. It says that for

“a person serving a sentence of detention for public protection, the Secretary of State must refer his case to the Parole Board … after he has served the relevant part of his sentence”.

That is a tariff and is already standing practice. What is new is the proposal that the Secretary of State must refer a person’s case to the Parole Board,

“where there has been a previous reference of his case to the Board, no later than the period of one year beginning with the disposal of that reference”.

The emphasis in both these amendments is on the regularity of reviews. When I was Lord Justice General, I saw this working well in my visits to the Parole Board. As I mentioned earlier, there are files prepared that have to be examined in detail, but the Parole Board appointed a particular member to take on a particular case, so that each time it came up for review, the member could reinforce what was in the files by explaining his or her own view of what was taking place and, as time went on, reinforce it by previous discussions. In that way, continuity was provided to the whole process.

Each board will have its own method of dealing with it, but the structure of what is provided by these two amendments provides a basis on which the Parole Board can exercise its views with a view to achieving what is set out in proposed new subsection (2) in Amendment 162, ensuring that all possible steps are taken to ensure safe release at the earliest possible time.

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 155 in this group. The principles behind and the purposes of the amendments we have been discussing have already been well forked over, so I will cut straight to the chase.

I have intervened in Committee only on one other group of amendments, a few weeks ago on restorative justice. I link the two because they offer the opportunity to break cycles of offending and to give the individuals involved a chance of hope, to avoid the hopelessness that my noble and learned friend the Minister said was so pernicious when he was summing up the first group of amendments; the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton, also said it when contributing to a later group. Nowhere can this be more important than when dealing with young offenders. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, the individuals who make up the group covered by these amendments are unlikely, at the time of their initial sentence, to have a great deal of emotional maturity or self-discipline. They are children, as she pointed out. This is unsurprising, given the likelihood of their background and their life chances prior to their sentence. One hopes that the framework provided by the prison regime for young offenders will accelerate that emotional and other development, paving the way for a return to society.

I endorse the remarks of my noble friend Lord Attlee and the noble Baroness that this is not seen as a soft option. We have to make sure that the public are properly protected—otherwise, respect for and confidence in our judicial and penal system are undermined.

This group is going to undergo a further shock. At a meeting of the All-Party Group on prisons, we had evidence from young people—25 year-olds, really—about what it was like to move from a young offender institution to full prison life. The evidence was pretty startling. The guy said that life in a young offender institution was no bed of roses, but when you got into prison it was a whole different world—quite shocking. Clearly, he was very shocked by it. Indeed, Recommendation 24 of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee report addresses the issue of how you transition and what it means to the people who are so caught up in it. He went on to say that, for some people, it hardened them into a life where they would be persistent offenders but, for some others, it was a wake-up call. They saw that it was a chance, if they managed to get their act together, and were encouraged, to be able to break out—and part of that was seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. This is one of the issues that is very important in these amendments: it is about light at the end of the tunnel, and people being able to see that something can happen to them.

I shall end with a different example that is completely outside the matters that we have been discussing but which might give a sense of what it feels like to be given an IPP sentence. My father’s best friend was captured at Dunkirk in June 1940. He was 24 years old, and he was in a prisoner of war camp until May 1945, when the war came to an end—first in Germany, then in Poland. He went in at 24 and came out at nearly 30. He did not talk about it much, but I remember when I was about 20 him being prepared to talk about what the experience was like. So much of it was like having an IPP sentence.

It began with a sense of shame: had you done enough? Should you have gone on to the bitter end and had you, by surrendering, let your country down? But that died away. Then it was about hardship, which was quite great in the first winter of the war, 1940-41, until Red Cross parcels and parcels from home began to arrive. But my father’s friend said that none of that in any way matched up to the appalling sense of hopelessness —that month after month and year after year ticked by, and you could feel your life running through your fingers.

My father’s friend could articulate that, but I suspect that that is what quite a lot of the IPP individuals are feeling, to some extent, even if they are not able to put it clearly into words. They are the ones for whom I hope we can find ways to help, so that they get that sense of hope. In the prisoner of war camp—they put it rather more roughly in those days—a lot of people behaved rather oddly. What they were saying, of course, was that they were under extreme mental stress. There were no drugs, of course, because they were not available in those days, but the stress of persistent confinement in very crowded conditions undoubtedly had a huge effect on a number of people in a prisoner of war camp.

That is why we need opportunities for reviews of individual cases to take place as often as is consonant with public safety. That is why I support this group of amendments and why I put my name to Amendment 155 in particular.

My Lords, I am very struck by the words of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, about light at the end of the tunnel. That is what this suite of amendments is about for a cohort of young people who, at the moment, will not be seeing a light at the end of that tunnel. I thank my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti for speaking with such clarity about what these amendments are about, and other noble Lords who have described what this must feel like for a young person and pointed, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, did, to some of the remedies that these three amendments offer to the Minister and the Government. I hope that they take them up and carry them through.

My Lords, I again thank noble Lords for all the points made on this part of the Bill. I shall take it first in the general and then the particular. In the general, these amendments quite rightly put on the radar, the horizon and public consciousness the importance of dealing with prisoners who received their sentence when they were still under the age of 18. This is already a very important function that these amendments have performed. As for the question of the light at the end of the tunnel, I share the thoughts of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, were very pertinent as to what it feels like to be incarcerated in the dramatic circumstances that he related.

It is the Government’s view that these prisoners, among others, need to have light at the end of the tunnel. This is the whole purpose and thrust of the Government’s approach. In practical terms, as I understand it we have 32 prisoners in this position who have not been released, another 48 who have been recalled, and a hundred or so out in the community. These figures may not be exactly right; they are not quite the same as those given by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, although they are approximately the same. For the recalled cohort and for those in the community, the reduction in the licence period from 10 years to three will be significant and very much benefit those serving this DPP sentence. Against this background, the Government are not quite persuaded that these amendments would achieve our joint objective of providing this light at the end of the tunnel.

I turn to the proposals in Amendments 155 and 163. The first would reduce the qualifying period from three years to 18 months. Eighteen months is quite a short period. The Government are not persuaded that one and a half years is sufficient time for an offender to demonstrate their ability to reintegrate successfully into the community, so we are hesitant about this. This particular, very sensitive cohort needs careful management in the community. To reduce the time to 18 months risks setting them up to fail.

We feel similarly about an annual referral to the Parole Board. Getting into this kind of rhythm automatically without regard to the progress of a particular prisoner and the various factors in play could also risk setting people up to fail. The Government are not persuaded that this automaticity is a good idea. In any event, there is already a two-year referral period and people are often referred earlier. It is right to point out that the recently revised Parole Board guidance gives express priority to DPP prisoners, so I suggest that they are being properly served by the Parole Board and by the frequency of reviews. The Government are not persuaded on the detail of these amendments, although we accept the general thrust of the argument.

Basically the same applies to Amendment 162, which would require quarterly sentence planning reviews to be held to set out what is expected. I take the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, that the aim is to make sure that close attention is paid to future progress, that things are not allowed to slip back and that there are regular phases in the prisoner’s progress. The Government are not convinced that quarterly sentence planning reviews are, of themselves, necessarily the right way to go, but the IPP action plan requires that each prisoner has a robust and effective sentence plan, tailored to their individual needs and supporting those released into the community. Quarterly reviews would not necessarily allow sufficient time between them to ensure sufficient progress. Again, the Government are concerned about the details of the amendments, rather than the overall objective of dealing properly with these DPP offenders.

That aside, the Government very much recognise the need to support these offenders. There will be additional psychological support, in particular through the psychology services of HMPPS, and there will be operational delivery plans across England and Wales which are envisaged to include a priority focus for DPP prisoners.

When I spoke earlier of the possibility, between now and Report, of putting the action plan, or the need to have an action plan, on some kind of statutory basis, and possibly setting out in the statute, in broad terms, what the action plan should cover, it seems, to me at least, that there would be an important argument for providing that the action plan has to have a section on DPP offenders and has to demonstrate that these offenders are given priority and that there is an appropriate regime for them. A combination of that kind of provision in the action plan plus the existing priority given to DPP offenders by the Parole Board would go a very long way to achieving the joint objectives that noble Lords are envisaging. That is broadly the Government’s position.

Before the noble and learned Lord sits down, will he comment on the point I was making about the aim of having these reviews written into the statute? Subsection (2) in the new clause set out in Amendment 162 says that they are taking place

“with a view to ensuring that all possible steps are taken to enable their safe release at the earliest possible time”.

That flags up, at the outset, exactly what these reviews are dealing with. I do not know whether it is already in the action plan that the Minister has been referring to, but is there some way of getting that purpose clearly identified, and of course communicating that purpose to the DPP prisoners themselves who are subject to the system, so that they know that that is the purpose for which these reviews are being conducted?

I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, for that point. It is certainly something I will take away when we come to consider the Government’s position.

I apologise, because I know my noble and learned friend wants to complete his speech, but I ask this question simply because I failed to hear. The action plan has been spoken of a lot during the course of this evening. Is that an existing document, and is it published?

Yes, and yes.

On the basis that I accept, on behalf of the Government, the importance of this topic, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

I am grateful to all noble Lords in the Committee. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, not least for giving us an opportunity to thank, once more, the Prison Reform Trust, and I would add the Howard League for Penal Reform and UNGRIPP, in particular, who are the family members of these desperate people in many cases. I thank her for pointing out this issue of the window of opportunity for rehabilitation and seeing another possible way of life.

Hope springs eternal, and therefore we are particularly lucky to have “hope” in the form of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, who is so active in this Committee. Every point he made was quite hard, if I may say so, to resist. But my man of the match, I am afraid, was, none the less the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots, because I feel that one of the reasons that we have not had a serious penal reform campaign in this country, possibly since the Victorian period, is because we have lost empathy for the prisoner. We have locked them away—out of sight, out of mind. They do not vote, et cetera: all these things that will set the alarm bells ringing at the Daily Mail, if anybody is up there. We have lost empathy for these people. They are not human anymore; they are prisoners; but in this group of amendments at least, we are talking about people who were children when they were given this sentence, and the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots, had sufficient empathy to compare “criminals” with his late father’s friend and a war hero is the kind of empathy that I rarely hear about any demonised group in our society, whether it is convicted people, refugees and asylum seekers or anyone else who is, for the moment, in a demonised category. I am grateful to the noble Lord for what he said.

I am grateful, of course, to my noble friend Lady Thornton for the support of the Labour Front Bench. She of course was an Equality Minister in the not-too-distant past, and I hope that she will be one in the not-too-distant future, shortly, or in due course, or whatever these other phrases are that are occasionally—

We are not complacent.

We are never complacent, but always with hope.

Finally, in that regard, I noted that the noble and learned Lord the Minister said, “not quite persuaded”. In that “quite”, in that little space, I will keep hope. I was here to keep my noble friend’s hope alive in his absence, because these amendments were particularly important to him.

I do not wish her noble friend to place overreliance on the word “quite” in terms of statutory amendments. Statutory amendments are rather different from a proper approach in the action plan and putting that on a statutory basis.

I am grateful, but my hope is not dashed, not least because my noble friend is a force of nature, as he has demonstrated throughout his career with the integrity that others have referred to in the way that he has conducted himself over this particular issue in recent times. I need to put on the record for the Committee that he feels particularly strongly about the injustice faced by this cohort. I repeat: every argument we have aired earlier this evening becomes turbocharged in relation to these people, who were children when they were placed under this sentence. But for the moment, at least, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 155 withdrawn.

Amendments 156 to 158 not moved.

Clause 48 agreed.

Amendments 159 to 166 not moved.