This week, a fresh attempt will be made to resolve the scandal of the IPP sentence once and for all.
The attempt will come in the form of a Private Members’ Bill, by the Labour peer Lord Woodley: the Imprisonment for Public Protection (Resentencing) Bill.
The life sentence-like IPP was imposed on thousands of people between 2005 and 2012. Abolished in 2012, but not retrospectively, nearly 2,800 remain languishing in prison, sometimes for years after the term set by the court. This is equivalent to the population of four medium-sized men’s prisons. Those released from prison live under the shadow of recall to prison, often for minor infractions of licence conditions.
Lord Woodley’s Bill, if it becomes law, will place the Justice Secretary under a legal obligation to ensure that all those serving an IPP sentence, whether in prison or in the community, are retrospectively given a determinate sentence. For the vast majority of IPP prisoners this will result in their swift and more than justified release. Such an exercise was the primary recommendation of the House of Commons Justice Committee in its 2022 report on IPP.
Before the election, the outgoing Conservative government rejected resentencing. It did, though, pass legislation shortening the post-release licence conditions for released IPP prisoners, so reducing the number of released prisoners recalled to custody. Labour is yet to implement this change. It should get on with it.
While the government wrestles with the short-term prison capacity crisis – recent reports suggest that there are fewer than 100 places available across the entire estate in England and Wales – I hope that ministers and their advisers are also thinking long and hard about the medium-term capacity crisis barrelling quickly towards them.
The prison population currently stands at just over 88,000. Three years from now, if current projections are accurate, it could be more than 105,000, or even higher. Boosterish claims by ministers that they will build the necessary additional places to meet this demand appear slightly fanciful.
This is where a measure such as Lord Woodley’s Bill comes in. Resentencing all those subject to the IPP sentence will go some way to heading off the medium-term prison capacity crisis.
Labour, not unreasonably, argues that the immediate, short-term capacity crisis is a legacy of the outgoing Conservative government. But now Labour is in government. It is time to act.
If Labour continues to reject measures like the resentencing of those serving and IPP sentence, and other creative solutions to the medium-term capacity crisis coming down the road, the resulting mess will be on it alone.
