Sir Nicholas Dakin

The Lord Chancellor laid a written ministerial statement yesterday, the background to which are the changes around fixed-term recall in the light of the prison capacity challenges that the Government face. When we were elected almost a year ago, we inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse. Although we took immediate action to prevent the catastrophe, prisons continue to be perilously close to filling up entirely. Last December we published a long-term building strategy, setting out our aim to open up 14,000 prison places by 2031. That is the largest expansion of the prison estate since the Victorians. We have already committed £2.3 billion to prison expansion, and since taking office we have delivered 2,400 new places. We also commissioned the independent sentencing review, which will report shortly. The sentencing review will hopefully offer us a path to ending the capacity crisis in our prisons for good, but the impact of sentencing reforms will not be felt before next spring. On our current trajectory, we will hit zero capacity in our prisons in November—we cannot allow that to happen. That is why we have announced our intention to lay a fixed-term recall statutory instrument that will mean that those serving sentences of between one and four years can only be returned to prison for a fixed 28-day period. The measure builds on previous legislation, introduced by the last Government, that mandated 14-day recalls for those serving sentences of under a year. To be clear, higher-risk offenders have been exempted from that change. If further information relating to an offender’s risk is received after they have been recalled which means they are no longer considered suitable for fixed-term recall, they may be detained for longer on a standard recall if that is assessed as necessary.