Alex Norris

With your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement on the implementation of the Sentencing Act 2026. When this Labour Government took office, we inherited a crisis in our prisons. They were regularly at 99% capacity, with fewer than 100 places available at one stage. We were one bad day away from running out of space, which would have meant the courts being forced to suspend trials, the police being unable to make arrests, and there would be nowhere to put dangerous criminals—a total breakdown of law and order, with victims bearing the brunt. My predecessors acted swiftly to stabilise our prisons by committing to the most ambitious prison-building programme since the Victorians and pledging 14,000 new prison places by 2031, with 3,200 already delivered. Compare that with the record of the Conservative party, which added just 500 net places in 14 years. We have also deported nearly 12,000 foreign national offenders, but we had to ensure that we never return to the shambolic emergency releases carried out, with little scrutiny or warning, by the previous Government. We passed the Sentencing Act, which introduced the earned progression model, whereby offenders on standard determinate sentences spend at least a third of their sentence behind bars, and longer if they behave badly. More serious offences require people to serve at least half of their sentence, with no upper limit for time spent inside for bad behaviour. But release from prison is not the end of the story. We have overseen the largest ever expansion of tagging and, working closely with the police, we are giving the Probation Service access to the largest and toughest range of measures to manage offenders. Every single offender leaving prison can now be tagged, and strict licence conditions can include curfews and bans from pubs, clubs and even football matches. There will be exclusion zones where criminals cannot go. For the most serious sexual and violent offenders, we are introducing world-first “restriction zones” that confine them to specific areas, which are sometimes a few miles wide, curtailing their liberty in order to give victims more freedom. If conditions are breached, offenders can be recalled to prison. This clearly asks more of our brilliant Probation Service, so we are also investing £700 million more in probation and community services by 2028-29, and we are hiring a further 1,300 trainee probation officers, on top of the 2,300 recruited in the past two years. Let me be clear about who the model applies to. The most dangerous offenders, who have been locked up for serious violent and sexual offences, and those on life sentences were never eligible, but the Prime Minister and I were determined to look again. We moved quickly to exclude rape and many serious child sex and grooming offences, and we have gone further still by excluding all unlawful killing offences—including death by dangerous or drink-driving, causing or allowing the death of a child, and manslaughter—as well as indecent assault, which has been used to prosecute historical child sex abuse. This means hundreds more dangerous criminals staying behind bars for longer, including those who killed PC Andrew Harper in the line of duty. It is the right thing to do, and I pay tribute to his wife Lissie and his mother Debbie, who campaigned for this. We would like to have gone further, but we were unable to do so due to the lack of investment by the previous Government over 14 years. I want to reassure the House that victims in the victim contact scheme are being kept informed by dedicated victim liaison officers. We are rightly giving victims the opportunity to have their say on licence conditions for offenders in their case, and I have instructed my officials to attempt to trace all affected victims for whom we do not have the details. On top of that, we are boosting victim support with a £18.9 million funding package, including a dedicated free helpline offering emotional support for anyone affected, and specialist support for victims of violence against women and girls. I have asked the Prisons Minister to work with victims groups to shape our response, because victims must come first. The Prime Minister and I have pushed the system to its limits. At the same time, my duty is to ensure that we always have the space to lock up offenders. Today I can announce a fast-tracked plan to create more headroom in our prison system by bringing forward more than £110 million of funding. We have identified where we can accelerate the delivery of more places, including by converting space within prisons into cells, and we are pushing to deliver current building plans more quickly. We will also invest in new land for prisons and build a credible pipeline of new sites to enable more prison building, because my top priority is to build a long-term, sustainable future for our prison estate. We are also freeing up space in the shorter term. There are thousands of foreign national offenders in our prisons, at vast expense to taxpayers. We have increased removals by 41% compared with the last two years of the previous Tory Government, and we have changed the law to expand the early removal scheme. Now we will go further. Next year we will begin removing foreign national offenders serving determinate sentences immediately after sentencing, but I want to reassure the House that the most dangerous offenders, such as those already excluded from the Sentencing Act changes, will still be required to serve prison time before being deported. I want to be clear that all removed offenders will be barred from returning to the UK for life, because deportation is the anchor of that punishment. If you break our laws and abuse Britain’s hospitality, we will permanently remove you. We will also act on a long-standing injustice. More than 2,000 people are still trapped by indeterminate imprisonment for public protection, or IPP, sentences. They were rightly abolished a decade ago, but offenders are still locked up for far longer than envisaged, often for crimes that, if committed today, would see them spend much less time in jail. Of those who have never been released, 99% are beyond the tariff imposed by the court, and 80% have served 10 years or more beyond it. Tragically, with no end of their sentence in sight, some IPP prisoners have taken their own lives. Concerns about IPPs have been raised across the political spectrum, including by the former Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, who called them “a stain” on our justice system. The number of IPP offenders has been reducing, but the Prime Minister and I want to go further. We will soon bring forward legislation to end the sentence, once and for all, by the end of this Parliament. These are complex cases, and some of these offenders have committed serious crimes. Public safety will always be my top priority, but we must balance that with fairness on sentences. It will take time to get this right, but the work will begin immediately, and I offer Members of all parties and none in this place the opportunity to work together on a cross-party basis. I will listen to experts inside and outside this House, including the former Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, and the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett. They are committed advocates of IPP reform, whom I thank for agreeing to work with me. In the meantime, we will do everything within the existing framework to support those in prison to move towards a safe and sustainable release. I also intend to look at how we can improve outcomes for offenders with complex needs. Women in prison often have high levels of trauma, abuse, mental ill-health and addiction. Many are mothers and their children can be affected profoundly by them being in prison, so I want to reduce the number of women in custody where it is safe to do so, alongside a cross-Government agenda to address the drivers of women’s offending. For youth offenders, I am announcing £4.5 million of investment for robust community alternatives to locking children up in expensive, ineffective and unsuitable prisons. To help solve the crisis in adult prisons, I have decided to temporarily hold some 18-year-olds in our youth estate for longer. My job is to balance the sustainability of our prisons with public protection, the rights of victims and public confidence in the justice system. The decisions that the Prime Minister and I have had to take are difficult ones. We would like to have gone further, but the Government inherited a system on the brink of failure. I am clear that there must always be space for dangerous offenders, because protecting the public means fixing prisons for good. Otherwise, it is victims who are let down. We will never let that happen. This Government will run towards problems, including the tough decisions needed to build a justice system that is firm, fair and that protects the public. Those aims will guide me as I tackle its challenges, reform it for a sustainable future and ensure it commands the confidence of the British public. I commend this statement to the House.