Mark Lyttleton is a business mentor, angel investor and long-time advocate of the Prison Reform Trust. This article will look at changes to parole eligibility criteria for prisoners serving IPP or life sentences and concerns over their implications.
Peter
Dawson, director of the Prison
Reform Trust, gave evidence to the House of Commons Justice Committee on 28th
February 2023 as part of its ongoing enquiry into the prison workforce.
Following the meeting, Sir Bob Neil MP, chair of the House of Commons Justice
Committee, wrote to the Justice Secretary, requesting further information on
the recent changes to eligibility criteria for prisoners serving IPP or life
sentences to transfer to open conditions.
The
letter evidenced what the Prison Reform Trust’s previous Freedom of Information
request revealed: a significant change in the likelihood of the Ministry of Justice
approving the transfer of prisoners to open conditions following a positive
recommendation from the Parole Board. The letter also suggested that this
change predates the formal alteration of Parole Board rules on 6th
June 2022.
In a
report published on the Prison Reform Trust website, Peter Dawson suggested that
this discovery was important. He indicated that the policy basis for such
dramatic change before the new rules came into force seemed to the Prison
Reform Trust to be ‘pretty meagre’. Mr Dawson reflected that it really boiled
down to the Justice Secretary using a ‘more precautionary approach’ in the Root
and Branch review and public statements.
Peter
Dawson said that the letter also confirmed what the Prison Reform Trust had
assumed from earlier Freedom of Information requests, namely that the Secretary
of State had only been personally involved in cases where officials had
suggested that a recommendation from the Parole Board should be accepted. Given
that so few cases have produced that result, it seems that responsibility for interpreting
precisely what a ‘more precautionary approach’ really entails may have been
left to senior officials with delegated authority to reject cases without consulting
the Secretary of State. Peter Dawson highlighted that these changes occurred
out of the sight of the prisoners concerned and their legal representatives.
The Prison Reform Trust expressed concern that these changes
had taken place without the involvement or knowledge of either Parliament or
the Parole Board. The organisation suggested that a very substantial change in
practice had occurred on the basis of a three-word description of the policy,
before a change in Parole Board rules had been m
ade to flesh out and give
statutory force to what those words might mean.
