On 25th May 2023, the Bishop of St Albans spoke in a debate on the government’s Imprisonment for Public Protection Action Plan, pointing out a high rate of suicide among prisoners serving IPP sentences and urging reform of the system:
The Lord Bishop of St Albans: My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his tenacity and for keeping this terrible situation before us. I rise with a certain reluctance because I do not have the expertise that many other noble Lords in this debate have, though like all bishops I have a right to visit the prisons in my diocese, which I do, and I am regularly in touch with people working in the legal and penal systems. My colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, the lead bishop on prisons, has raised this matter on numerous occasions and sadly cannot be here today.
It is now seven months since the House of Commons Justice Select Committee issued its report on IPP sentences. There were some alarming conclusions in it, such as noting:
“The indefinite nature of the sentence has contributed to feelings of hopelessness and despair”,
leading to some suicides within the IPP population. There are reports that perhaps as many as 81 people have taken their own life when serving an IPP sentence. If we could identify in any other area of life that 81 lives had been taken, we would be calling for inquiries and wanting answers. Many of us are concerned to hear of further, more recent suicides.
It seems it is the very nature of these sentences that contributes to the hopelessness—sentences where there is no end in sight and where people are uncertain about the necessary threshold for return to prison. As has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, many are fearful that even speaking about their mental health to a professional—the very person to whom they would be looking to get support and treatment—could be used as further evidence against them towards continued imprisonment.
One of the promises of the new IPP action plan is to introduce further measures to ensure that individualised support is available for each offender. One recommendation from the Justice Select Committee that I would like to draw attention to is the Parole Board’s agreement to review the listings priority framework in the light of IPP prisoners. These prisoners are stuck with incredibly long waiting times and what the committee calls an “ineffective” parole process stemming from chronic underresourcing. Will the Minister be able to update us on this review?
As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, so rightly remarked two years ago, IPP sentences are the greatest single stain on the justice system. The suggestion that a person can, at a moment’s notice, be arbitrarily recalled to prison without having committed any further crimes is surely fundamentally opposed to natural justice and can have no place in our legal system. We often talk about our legal system in this country being a beacon; this surely brings that into question. The IPP action plan serves only to prolong an unjust legal mechanism, one that has been widely condemned by campaigners, charities, and psychiatrists and psychologists, and is contributing to self-harm and suicide. It is an affront to our legal values.
The solution recommended by the Justice Select Committee is a resentencing exercise where prisoners can be given a sentence appropriate for their crime. If we cannot do that, I hope that the Minister and his advisers will look closely at the need to find some other mechanism to address this terrible problem as quickly as possible and to give people fair sentences for their crimes but, once they have served them, to allow them to be released back into society.
Extracts from the speeches that followed:
Lord Coaker (Lab): Countless testimonies and studies have shown the link between serving an IPP sentence and deteriorating mental health, self-harm and suicide. As the right reverend Prelate mentioned, 81 IPP prisoners have taken their own lives while in prison. In 2022 alone, there were nine suicides—the highest number in any year since IPPs were introduced. Does the Minister agree with the Royal College of Psychiatrists that
“Mental Health services in prison are not equipped to manage the complexities of many of those subject to IPP in prison and additional resource and development of expertise is needed”?
Can the Minister outline what action is being taken to deal with these mental health problems?
Lord Bellamy (Con, Ministry of Justice): With the greatest respect to the right reverend Prelate, there is no evidence that these recalls are arbitrary; they are for the breach of licence conditions. It may well be that there are some licence conditions that are difficult to comply with, or that the individuals themselves find it difficult to comply with; that, therefore, is something to be looked at. As the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has just remarked, the Chief Inspector of Probation is about to investigate in detail the processes of recall to see whether this is being done properly and proportionately. That is a very important new element of the situation.
I respectfully suggest that the action plan is a very important step forward and another new element. The essential purpose of the action plan is exactly the purpose that the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, referred to, which is to break the Catch-22. How will we go about breaking the Catch-22? This is a shared problem. The Government are not trying to reserve the problem to themselves; it is a problem that every noble Lord and every member of the community can make an important contribution to. That is why, among other things, we have included an external stakeholder group in the arrangements, and why the Government have committed to publishing regularly information on its progress, so that everybody can see the data—data is a pretty important part of this—and the whole process can be put under the spotlight. That is what needs to happen: this issue needs to come up the agenda and be put under the spotlight.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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