I beg to move,

That this House
has considered the future of the Parole Board.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Murray. I come to this debate on the future of the Parole Board not as an expert in jurisprudence, or the theology of jurisprudence, but from my experience as a constituency MP and a member of the Science and Technology Committee. That Committee looks at, among other areas, how public bodies and Government Departments use evidence when coming to decisions. On 7 September 2022, the Science and Technology Committee had a really interesting session looking at the basis that the Parole Board had for making what are very difficult decisions, in many cases, about who to release on parole. I advise any interested person to read the transcript of that session.

Unusually, I want to start by thanking the Secretary of State for Justice. At the last Justice questions, I brought up the case of Andrew Longmire, also known as Andrew Barlow and previously, I think, as Andrew Seamark, a man who was given many life sentences, the last one in 2017, for rape. I asked the Secretary of State whether he would look into the matter, and he released a statement yesterday saying that he was asking the Parole Board for a reconsideration of that case. I am grateful to him for doing that. I am sure that the victims and the families of victims of Andrew Barlow who have contacted me are also grateful.

I would like to thank Neal Keeling, the Manchester Evening News journalist, who has written a number of stories about this case in that paper. Without those stories, I would not have known that Andrew Barlow was likely to be released, and neither would the families of victims and the victims themselves. I have had a large number of harrowing emails from people describing how their families and personal lives have been destroyed by this man and the multiple rapes he carried out over a period of time.

One of the issues in this case, which I obviously will not go into a great deal of detail about, is that Andrew Barlow was given his first life sentences over 30 years ago, and the progress on DNA analysis meant that the police went back on cold cases and found that he had committed two further rapes, so he was given two further life sentences. Amazingly, he said that he did not remember them. That factor should be taken into account in any Parole Board hearing. If the Parole Board wants to know whether people are remorseful and have changed their view, that is an indication of callousness. As many of the victims and their families who have written to me say, the man is a threat to them and to their families and should remain behind bars. I hope that the reconsideration leads to that.

Let me look at how the Parole Board operates and the decision taken by the Government immediately to change some of the process and carry out a full review, which was stimulated by the John Worboys case. There was a public outcry that he was going to be released. That case made many people think that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the Parole Board was working. Following judicial review, the Court came to the view that

“the Parole Board didn’t do its job properly.”

That is an understatement of what happened. The Parole Board did not look at all the evidence and it did not look at the court decision properly when deciding that Worboys was going to be released. He was a category A prisoner, which means the Secretary of State thought he was a threat to society, but the decision was taken that he could apply for parole.