The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)

My Lords, following the Oral Statement which I repeated in this House on Wednesday 24 July, your Lordships will know that our prisons are in crisis. The male prison estate has been running at around 99% capacity for 18 months, undermining safety for staff and offenders and making the justice system vulnerable to unforeseen events. If we do not act urgently, our prisons will reach full capacity, and the justice system may grind to a halt. The courts would have to stop holding trials, the police would be unable to make arrests, and criminals would be free to act without consequence. If we do not act now, this will become reality by September. Taking immediate action is the only way to protect the public from a breakdown in law and order. I want to assure your Lordships that we have explored all options. In the little time we have, we cannot build more prisons nor add more prison blocks. While we are deporting foreign national offenders as fast as is legally possible, this will not save enough places to address this crisis. Much of the pressure comes from the straightforward growth in the remand population—those who are in prison awaiting trial. While we are committed to making progress on remand, it would take time that we do not have. This has left us with only one option. Before I set out the details, let me say that I am grateful to your Lordships for agreeing to bring this SI forward before the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments has been re-formed and therefore able to consider it. As I have already set out, this change may be implemented with urgency. It has therefore been necessary to ensure that we have a full debate on the substance of the issues as soon as possible. I look forward to reading the committee’s report and that of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Returning to the SI that we are considering today, it will change the law so that prisoners serving eligible standard determinate sentences will have their automatic release point for those sentences adjusted to 40% rather than 50%. This will mean that around 5,500 offenders will be released in two tranches in September and October. They will leave prison early to serve the rest of their sentence under strict licence conditions in the community. Thereafter, all qualifying sentences will continue to be subject to the new 40% release point. This change applies to both male and female offenders. It also applies to some youth offences, specifically youth sentences under Section 250 of the Sentencing Act 2020, which are imposed on under-18s for more serious offences. They are included, because such offences are likely to end their term in the adult estate. However, as these sentences are for serious crimes, many are likely to be excluded from this measure, as I will go on to explain. While this measure must address the crisis in our prisons, this must be balanced with public protection. Therefore, certain sentences will be excluded. The worst violent and sexual crimes, which are subject to a 67% release point, will not be eligible. Neither will serious violent offences subject to a sentence of four years or more under Part 1 of Schedule 15 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Sexual offences will be excluded, including offences related to child sexual abuse, and we will exclude a series of offences linked to domestic abuse, including stalking, controlling or coercive behaviour and non-fatal strangulation. National security and terrorism offences under the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act 2023, and offences determined to have been carried out for a foreign power, will also be excluded, as will serious terrorism offences and terrorism-connected offences, which remain subject to a 67% release at the Parole Board’s discretion. No sentence subject to Parole Board release will be included. In each case, we have excluded specific offences rather than cohorts of offenders. That is a legal necessity. The power to make the SI applies to the release point of qualifying individual sentences, rather than to types of offender. In addition to these exclusions, there will be stringent protections in place around an early release. This change to the law will not take effect until September. This has given our hard-working Prison and Probation Service a crucial eight-week implementation period to recalculate sentences and plan for the releases. Probation officers will have the time they need to assess the risk of each offender and prepare a plan to manage them safely in the community. Every offender released will be subject to the same stringent licence conditions they would have been if released at 50%. Where necessary, multi-agency public protection arrangements will be put in place to protect the public, as will multi-agency risk assessment conferences that consider how best to protect victims. Victims eligible for the victim contact scheme or the victim notification scheme will be notified about releases and developments in their cases, and, as now, they will be able to request licence conditions, such as non-contact requirements or exclusion zones to protect them from unwanted contact. Offenders will be ordered to wear electronic tags where required. Exclusion zones and curfews will be imposed where appropriate. If an offender breaks any of these conditions, they can be returned to prison. The Government are clear that this change is not permanent. We will review it within 18 months of implementation, at the very latest in March 2026 when we believe that the situation in our prisons will have stabilised and we will be able to return the automatic point of release to 50% of a sentence. I want to address directly the question of a sunset clause, which we have not included in this legislation, to end it automatically. We have pledged to be honest about the challenges in our prisons and the changes that we put in place to rise to them. Given the scale of the crisis, placing an artificial time limit on this measure would be irresponsible. We have taken the very deliberate decision not to reverse this measure until we are certain that prison capacity has stabilised. We will introduce a new, higher standard of transparency. Every quarter we will publish data on the number of offenders released, and we will make it a statutory requirement for a prison capacity statement to be published annually, introducing this legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows. This is a departure from the approach of the previous Government, who introduced the end of custody supervised licence scheme, the ECSL scheme. They did not disclose the data, but now we know that more than 10,000 offenders have been released under ECSL. When this new legislation takes effect we can end ECSL, which gave the Probation Service sometimes mere days to prepare for releases. That meant little time to assess the risk of offenders and plan how they would be managed safely in the community.