Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)

My Lords, I will add just a line or two to all the statements so far. I immensely commend the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, for having the guts and fearsomeness of argument, the persistence and, thank goodness, the irritation to keep going and pushing this as far as we reasonably and possibly can—and must. We will hear, as we have already, essentially Second Reading re-runs, because we are all just fed up and angry. We know, as the Minister knows, that in his file sit rather wishy-washy arguments about public protection which just do not stack up. One of the reasons they do not is that any assessment of those still languishing in prison will show that, of the 1,000 plus on IPP sentences, looking at their original time of sentence, 80% of them were for non-violent offences. In which case, based on accurate judicial knowledge of those individuals, we cannot say that they pose a public risk. Because they have never been let out, we have no evidence to prove that they will behave otherwise. When they did go to courts for sentencing, they were not there for violent actions; in which case, let them out, for goodness’ sake. Do not continue to use the argument that there is a public protection issue; that is nonsense. It is simply a very nice Civil Service and Secretary of State way to say that we do not want to deal with it, because it keeps the public smiling. Ministers know that what they are really doing is perpetuating a gross, unacceptable injustice and acts of torture that are destroying individuals’ lives and sending them to suicide and desecration, and which are a gross stain on what we call justice or anything to do with it. I beg Ministers to take those pages out, hand them back to civil servants and say, “Meet some real prisoners”. I continue to receive information—three times in the last month—directly from prisoners who are on IPP sentences who have heard nothing of the provisions of last year’s legislation. This is even though all sorts of messages went out from the Ministry of Justice last year and this year to inform governors that they should make sure prisoners know about the changes in the regulations and legislation, and that reconsideration of their position is possible. They have heard nothing. Why? Some say that frankly, the system does not believe it is going to work. There is also too much bureaucracy in it. When we look at the range of amendments before us, both the probing ones but also, if necessary, the voting ones, what we are really seeing is all of us finding ways to hedge around this untidy mess. It is an untidy mess because the simplicity of accepting that a wrong has been consistently done means that there is a more straightforward way for a right to be consistently done. Give dignity to the individuals involved, accepting, as in the group meeting the Minister mentioned, that there may well be a few hundred who are simply so mentally distressed that they cannot participate in the process, they have lost hope altogether, they feel there is no point to their reassessment and they almost want to hang back on it all. That is a tragedy; it is a loss of human dignity and a destruction of their souls. For those few hundred, we need to find a different way to support their mental recovery, as one of the amendments does, but when it comes to the majority, we are begging the Minister not to swallow the argument that this is all about public protection. Those of us who work in prisons week in, week out, know very well that it is not.