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.