Criminal Justice Reform

With your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement on the implementation of the Sentencing Act 2026. When this Labour Government took office, we inherited a crisis in our prisons. They were regularly at 99% capacity, with fewer than 100 places available at one stage. We were one bad day away from running out of space, which would have meant the courts being forced to suspend trials, the police being unable to make arrests, and there would be nowhere to put dangerous criminals—a total breakdown of law and order, with victims bearing the brunt. My predecessors acted swiftly to stabilise our prisons by committing to the most ambitious prison-building programme since the Victorians and pledging 14,000 new prison places by 2031, with 3,200 already delivered. Compare that with the record of the Conservative party, which added just 500 net places in 14 years. We have also deported nearly 12,000 foreign national offenders, but we had to ensure that we never return to the shambolic emergency releases carried out, with little scrutiny or warning, by the previous Government. We passed the Sentencing Act, which introduced the earned progression model, whereby offenders on standard determinate sentences spend at least a third of their sentence behind bars, and longer if they behave badly. More serious offences require people to serve at least half of their sentence, with no upper limit for time spent inside for bad behaviour. But release from prison is not the end of the story. We have overseen the largest ever expansion of tagging and, working closely with the police, we are giving the Probation Service access to the largest and toughest range of measures to manage offenders. Every single offender leaving prison can now be tagged, and strict licence conditions can include curfews and bans from pubs, clubs and even football matches. There will be exclusion zones where criminals cannot go. For the most serious sexual and violent offenders, we are introducing world-first “restriction zones” that confine them to specific areas, which are sometimes a few miles wide, curtailing their liberty in order to give victims more freedom. If conditions are breached, offenders can be recalled to prison. This clearly asks more of our brilliant Probation Service, so we are also investing £700 million more in probation and community services by 2028-29, and we are hiring a further 1,300 trainee probation officers, on top of the 2,300 recruited in the past two years. Let me be clear about who the model applies to. The most dangerous offenders, who have been locked up for serious violent and sexual offences, and those on life sentences were never eligible, but the Prime Minister and I were determined to look again. We moved quickly to exclude rape and many serious child sex and grooming offences, and we have gone further still by excluding all unlawful killing offences—including death by dangerous or drink-driving, causing or allowing the death of a child, and manslaughter—as well as indecent assault, which has been used to prosecute historical child sex abuse. This means hundreds more dangerous criminals staying behind bars for longer, including those who killed PC Andrew Harper in the line of duty. It is the right thing to do, and I pay tribute to his wife Lissie and his mother Debbie, who campaigned for this. We would like to have gone further, but we were unable to do so due to the lack of investment by the previous Government over 14 years. I want to reassure the House that victims in the victim contact scheme are being kept informed by dedicated victim liaison officers. We are rightly giving victims the opportunity to have their say on licence conditions for offenders in their case, and I have instructed my officials to attempt to trace all affected victims for whom we do not have the details. On top of that, we are boosting victim support with a £18.9 million funding package, including a dedicated free helpline offering emotional support for anyone affected, and specialist support for victims of violence against women and girls. I have asked the Prisons Minister to work with victims groups to shape our response, because victims must come first. The Prime Minister and I have pushed the system to its limits. At the same time, my duty is to ensure that we always have the space to lock up offenders. Today I can announce a fast-tracked plan to create more headroom in our prison system by bringing forward more than £110 million of funding. We have identified where we can accelerate the delivery of more places, including by converting space within prisons into cells, and we are pushing to deliver current building plans more quickly. We will also invest in new land for prisons and build a credible pipeline of new sites to enable more prison building, because my top priority is to build a long-term, sustainable future for our prison estate. We are also freeing up space in the shorter term. There are thousands of foreign national offenders in our prisons, at vast expense to taxpayers. We have increased removals by 41% compared with the last two years of the previous Tory Government, and we have changed the law to expand the early removal scheme. Now we will go further. Next year we will begin removing foreign national offenders serving determinate sentences immediately after sentencing, but I want to reassure the House that the most dangerous offenders, such as those already excluded from the Sentencing Act changes, will still be required to serve prison time before being deported. I want to be clear that all removed offenders will be barred from returning to the UK for life, because deportation is the anchor of that punishment. If you break our laws and abuse Britain’s hospitality, we will permanently remove you. We will also act on a long-standing injustice. More than 2,000 people are still trapped by indeterminate imprisonment for public protection, or IPP, sentences. They were rightly abolished a decade ago, but offenders are still locked up for far longer than envisaged, often for crimes that, if committed today, would see them spend much less time in jail. Of those who have never been released, 99% are beyond the tariff imposed by the court, and 80% have served 10 years or more beyond it. Tragically, with no end of their sentence in sight, some IPP prisoners have taken their own lives. Concerns about IPPs have been raised across the political spectrum, including by the former Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, who called them “a stain” on our justice system. The number of IPP offenders has been reducing, but the Prime Minister and I want to go further. We will soon bring forward legislation to end the sentence, once and for all, by the end of this Parliament. These are complex cases, and some of these offenders have committed serious crimes. Public safety will always be my top priority, but we must balance that with fairness on sentences. It will take time to get this right, but the work will begin immediately, and I offer Members of all parties and none in this place the opportunity to work together on a cross-party basis. I will listen to experts inside and outside this House, including the former Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, and the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett. They are committed advocates of IPP reform, whom I thank for agreeing to work with me. In the meantime, we will do everything within the existing framework to support those in prison to move towards a safe and sustainable release. I also intend to look at how we can improve outcomes for offenders with complex needs. Women in prison often have high levels of trauma, abuse, mental ill-health and addiction. Many are mothers and their children can be affected profoundly by them being in prison, so I want to reduce the number of women in custody where it is safe to do so, alongside a cross-Government agenda to address the drivers of women’s offending. For youth offenders, I am announcing £4.5 million of investment for robust community alternatives to locking children up in expensive, ineffective and unsuitable prisons. To help solve the crisis in adult prisons, I have decided to temporarily hold some 18-year-olds in our youth estate for longer. My job is to balance the sustainability of our prisons with public protection, the rights of victims and public confidence in the justice system. The decisions that the Prime Minister and I have had to take are difficult ones. We would like to have gone further, but the Government inherited a system on the brink of failure. I am clear that there must always be space for dangerous offenders, because protecting the public means fixing prisons for good. Otherwise, it is victims who are let down. We will never let that happen. This Government will run towards problems, including the tough decisions needed to build a justice system that is firm, fair and that protects the public. Those aims will guide me as I tackle its challenges, reform it for a sustainable future and ensure it commands the confidence of the British public. I commend this statement to the House.

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

I welcome the Justice Secretary to his place. This is the Government’s fifth early release policy in just six weeks, since the Prime Minister took office. At every stage we were told that Ministers had no choice but to include dangerous criminals, because the alternative would be the “collapse” of the “entire system”. Now the plan is to stop one group of dangerous criminals leaving prison early by letting a different group of dangerous criminals out instead. The Justice Secretary and the Prime Minister have justified the plan to release IPP prisoners as a matter of principle, but it is no such thing. It is a fag-packet policy written to get them out of this crisis. Last year a Justice Minister rejected it, saying it would “put the public at risk”. Some 1,415 IPP prisoners had to be recalled to prison after release. The Parole Board says that the rest—856 prisoners—are too dangerous to be freed. Despite the new exclusions, many violent criminals will still be released after one third of their sentence. That includes domestic abusers and some paedophiles. The Justice Secretary says that if a domestic abuser breaches the terms of their release, tagging means that probation and the police will be alerted. He said this morning that these are “really good systems”, but most breaches result in no action at all. In fact, the Justice Secretary said this morning that early release is now “business as usual” and will go on for years to come. With that in mind, the Sentencing Act provides no end date to SDS33, so is this a permanent provision? If not, for how long does he think it should last? Can he rule out letting prisoners out even earlier with home detention curfews? Will he publish detailed capacity projections and all relevant data? Will the Justice Secretary give us a timeline and a target for his promise to get more foreign national prisoners out of the country? What is his plan to overcome barriers to deportation caused by the European convention on human rights, and in particular unqualified rights such as articles 2 and 3? How many cells will be established within the existing estate by the end of 2026, 2027 and 2028? Will he release every IPP prisoner by the end of the Parliament, as suggested in the Ministry of Justice statement on Sunday? Will prisoners who would have received a life sentence, had IPP sentences not existed, remain locked up? Will the Justice Secretary rule out watering down the criteria used by the Parole Board to assess IPP prisoners? And can he confirm that the changes to early release will come through secondary legislation, presenting MPs with a false binary choice and no chance to amend their plan? We have more than 700 fewer prison cells than last year and 1,600 fewer prison officers since the election. No new prisons have been planned or approved by this Government since the election. There are more than 4,000 operational available places and 4,000 more that are certified but out of use because of rules and regulations, officer shortages, and, in the case of Dartmoor prison, levels of radon gas that local residents live with every day. Describing the early release of criminals, a dangerous and irresponsible policy, as “business as usual” is not just an insult to victims, but a dereliction of duty.

I am grateful for the shadow Secretary of State’s kind words of welcome. I do not know him well, but I know that he, like me, shares a love for this country and that everything he does is seen through that prism. My commitment to him is to work with him. There will be times, perhaps even including today, when we will need to disagree in the best traditions of this place, but I know there will be a lot that brings us together over the months and hopefully years to come. On plans and changed plans, I make no apology—certainly not to the Opposition—for being able to grab hold of a system that, when we left here in July, was not going to exclude rape offences, child sex offences and those who have taken lives. We have now done that, which is good. I recognise that it has created uncertainty and I apologise to victims, but I hope they understand that it was done with noble purpose. We must now use the time available to make sure that victims get the right support, particularly when it comes to shaping restrictions on offenders if they do come out. The hon. Gentleman mentions plans. The reality is that if we followed his plan, we would have a prison system that would be bust before Christmas. What would that mean for justice in this country? How could that be right? He jumps on the phrase “business as usual”. The point I am trying to make is that this Parliament has changed legislation. The Sentencing Act is the basis on which standard determinate sentences will be governed, and that will be the case for the foreseeable future. Linked to that, he talks about how the changes will come into force. That will be done via varying the commencement order. He talks about home detention. I can say that I have no intention of going any further. The work we have put in as a result of the Sentencing Act is our way of managing the pressure in the system. On capacity, the hon. Gentleman asks for clarity. Well, I can provide a little bit of clarity: we should be clear that we have added 374 places in the adult male estate since the general election. Now, that is nowhere near where we want to get to as the end state—that is why our building programme has 14,000 places in it—but I would hope that wanting to do more is a point of shared interest. Of course, things do come in and out of the estate, including because of fire damage; I would not underestimate the importance of contamination either. Nevertheless, there will of course be significant places added in this Parliament and in our programme to 2031. The hon. Gentleman also asks about the chance to scrutinise the data. He will know that, under the Sentencing Act, we are committed to publishing an annual report. That is what we will do, and I am sure that he and I will get into it at that point. On foreign national offenders, if the hon. Gentleman has doubts, I will state my record to him and to the House. We have increased by 41% the removal of foreign offenders in this country. I gently say that that was my role in the Home Office, so he should not doubt my vigour. He mentions changes to article 3. He will know about the important work done on that at the Council of Europe. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards), has done a lot of important work in that space. Similarly, our work on article 8 is important and I hope the hon. Gentleman will support that when it comes before Parliament. He should not doubt our vigour; as I say, we are already doing well better than his predecessors—they are sat next to him, so he can talk to them about that—and we will go further. Let me finish on the IPP point, because I am really interested to see how it does and does not hold. I know that the hon. Gentleman is a champion of individual liberty and a sceptic of what he thinks is uneven justice. If I am able to make this acknowledgment, I hope he will at least reflect on it: there is a real dissatisfaction, as a result of the changes we have had to make, that some people will leave prison earlier than their sentence dictated, and that in many cases there will be people who are still there 10 years after. There is no easy solution to that. All I ask of him is to engage in a process to bring that to its resolution.

I call the Mother of the House.

Opposition Members seem to need reminding that the early release programme was devised by a Conservative Government. We have been debating at great length, in the media and among politicians, keeping people in prison for longer. I support Government policy on this issue, but I remind the House that the only things, ultimately, that make people safer are: giving more support to prison officers, including their salary; putting money into improving the prison estate—some prisons are Victorian buildings; and, finally, putting effort and money into the rehabilitation of prisoners, not just keeping them in prison longer.

I agree wholeheartedly with the value my right hon. Friend places on the important work of our prison officers and our probation officers. She is exactly right that what surely binds all of us is that we want to reduce reoffending. What I have presented to Parliament today is a measure to get us through a crisis, but we know that we have to build a new criminal justice system. That can be done from this Dispatch Box, but it also has to be done much more widely, including through work with our prison officers, our Probation Service, the police and our communities in order to reduce reoffending, which is what we all want.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

The Justice Secretary knows that the chaos and uncertainty for victims and their loved ones over the summer months from the handling of this scheme have been unforgivable. The Government have changed course countless times, leaving PC Andrew Harper’s family and countless others without the certainty that they deserve. The reality, as we all agree, is that in a properly functioning justice system, no victim or loved one should ever be told that their perpetrator is being released earlier than they were told when that sentence was handed down. However, if tough decisions have to be made, they have to be made carefully, sensitively and preparedly, with the safety of victims, loved ones and the public front of mind. How, therefore, will the Justice Secretary be communicating these—I hope—final changes to those who received the generic letters, including victims of grooming gangs and sexual abuse, earlier this year, and will those letters be tailored to each victim? He mentioned in his statement those who are not in the victim contact scheme and an effort by the MOJ to contact them. Can he please provide an assessment of how many victims he thinks that is, and how much resource he will be given to try to track them down? The reality for the new Justice Secretary is that his inheritance is now a public safety crisis. If probation staff go ahead with strike action, as threatened last month, is he confident that the system can safely manage the risks of releasing thousands of extra offenders? This has all the hallmarks of a national emergency waiting to happen, yet where is the emergency response? Can he explain why the national Criminal Justice Board has not met all year, despite these changes being discussed last year as part of the Sentencing Act, and will he now convene Cobra to give the situation the gravitas it deserves? The prison capacity crisis is one that this Government inherited two years ago, but they now own the response. As highlighted by the chief executive of the Howard League, we are “one major incident away from a disaster.” Prisons such as Wandsworth have been operating at 62% above their intended built capacity as the new normal, creating dangerous conditions that undermine any effort to rehabilitate offenders. What confidence can the Justice Secretary provide that he can deliver this increase in capacity on time, given past failings to do so, and that he can adequately staff it?

I am grateful for the Liberal Democrat spokesperson’s contribution. As I hope she heard me say, I do accept that the impact of our taking the summer to carve more offences out of this regime in a way that is safe and means we have a resilient prison estate has had an impact on victims and survivors and on their families, as they wait with uncertainty. I hope that is not unforgivable, in the sense that I hope it is understood that our aims were noble ones and have allowed us to go further—I think all Members would say that was a good thing. My mitigation and attempt to balance the situation is in what we do now. I am making a commitment from this Dispatch Box about the quality of engagement with victims and survivors. Everyone is being written to immediately to have a contact sent to them—trauma-informed engagement. This will introduce a conversation with a victim liaison officer specific to them and specific to the information about their offender’s release date and whether it is changing, and will help them to tailor the controls on their perpetrator so they can live the fullest possible life. On probation and capacity, I pay tribute to my predecessors as Lord Chancellor for the work that has been done to recruit more staff. That is not at its end state, but the £700 million investment is nevertheless starting to bear fruit. I think that gives us optimism for probation, but I am aware that there are still challenges. I have met staff and will continue to engage, and we of course want to avert strike action, as the hon. Member says. The hon. Member’s point on the national Criminal Justice Board speaks a little bit to the point I made to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott): I want to reinvigorate it as a place that takes real ownership of a reform of our criminal justice system. I think we would all accept that our criminal justice system is not delivering, and we are paying a lot for failure as well. I have not had very long in my role, as I hope the hon. Member would accept, but I certainly look forward to meeting the board. On convening Cobra, I have to say that it is not in my gift, but it is in the Prime Minister’s. However, the changes we have made are exactly to avert the scenario of getting to such a crisis. In the spirit of what the hon. Member says, I am conscious of the pressures we have put on over the summer—they have been for good aims—but now we need to build a much better system.

I thank my right hon. Friend for the statement, which will be welcomed by my constituents after a period of great anxiety, and I also thank him for his engagement with me over the summer. When PC Andrew Harper was killed in my constituency, it devastated our community, but it also left a deep determination to stand by our brave police, who run towards danger every day. Andrew Harper was the absolute best of us, and I would like to pay tribute to his family, who have fought so bravely in his memory. I would also like to thank everyone in my constituency and beyond who signed a petition and made their voices heard. Will the Secretary of State outline what steps he will take to show our brave police that this Government will always be on their side?

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her very direct campaigning to me over the summer about her and her community’s expectations. I join her in what she said about PC Andrew Harper: he was the very best of us. I really respect both Lissie Harper and Debbie Adlam for never having asked for special treatment. However, I think it is reflected in the actions of this Parliament—we changed the law subsequently—that we do think it is different when our emergency service workers are killed in the line of duty. It is right that we did that did that, but it did create an inequity, and it is right that we have corrected it. Again, I have apologised to both of them about the time it took to do so, but I am glad that we have been able to do it. On my hon. Friend’s final point, what I want to do for our brave police up and down the country is to have a system that is not running as hot as this, so they are not having to chase around all those symptoms of failure. That is a long-term piece of work, but it is one that starts immediately, and my commitment to them is to have them in the room during the process.

I know the Government will be doing their best to protect potential future victims of early release offenders, particularly those who were in jail for domestic abuse or other fixated behaviour, but it is not good enough simply to try to improve tagging measures; what one has to do is to improve the ability of potential victims to summon help if attacked again. Can the Justice Secretary confirm that the Government will make a unified representation of how such potential future victims can protect themselves—for example, by emergency alarms being fitted as a matter of routine?

Order. Before the Secretary of State responds, let me say that I understand how sensitive this topic is, but we have been in the Chamber a long time, and we have other items of business to get to, so please keep questions short and answers just as short.

The right hon. Gentleman is right to raise that point. It is part of the conversations that victim liaison officers are having, so that every victim and survivor is able to shape the support around them to make sure that they are feeling safe and secure.

I welcome the Government’s decision to end early release for certain serious offenders, including those responsible for the appalling killing of PC Harper, as we have heard. My former police colleagues and other emergency workers put themselves in harm’s way every day to keep us safe, and they must be able to have confidence in our system. Does the Justice Secretary agree with me that this decision sends them and others a clear and unequivocal message that this Government value their service, stand firmly with them and their families, and will ensure that those who commit the most serious crimes against them face the consequences of their actions?