Former Labour Home Secretary Lord David Blunkett has expressed regret over introducing imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences, calling it his "biggest mistake."
IPPs, implemented during his time in Tony Blair's government, have left some inmates imprisoned for nearly 20 years for minor crimes.
Though abolished in 2012, around 2,800 prisoners remain behind bars under these orders.
Blunkett is working with government officials to release many of these prisoners and avoid unnecessary recalls, acknowledging the significant impact of IPPs on the justice system.
IPPs, implemented during his time in Tony Blair's government, have left some inmates imprisoned for nearly 20 years for minor crimes.
Though abolished in 2012, around 2,800 prisoners remain behind bars under these orders.
Blunkett is working with government officials to release many of these prisoners and avoid unnecessary recalls, acknowledging the significant impact of IPPs on the justice system.
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00:00We all want people who come out of prison to be reformed. We want them to take their
00:04place in the community, to get a job, to get a home, to get a life.
00:09Of course. And, you know, I think in order to address this, we obviously have the new
00:14Labour government carrying over the previous government's plan of reducing the limit to 40%
00:20per year term, so that can be released or be considered to be.
00:24Yes, it's a temporary measure, just for three months. It will need to be followed by a much
00:28more substantial long-term reform. Just to give you two examples, because I spoke about
00:34them at the end of July in a very brief intervention, because we were only given five minutes each
00:39to speak. So many people wanted to contribute. This is staggering. There are 17,000 people
00:47on remand in prison, on remand, who have not yet been tried or not been sentenced.
00:54Last year, there were 27,800 recalls. That are people who are recalled, most of them,
01:01under a provision which recalls them for 28 days, and then there has to be a review,
01:05and most of them are let out. It's a crazy system, absolutely crazy. All of those have to be found
01:12a place, they have to appear in a cell. And what you're doing is you're jamming it up,
01:16you're dislocating it when you need those cells for people who have been
01:20sentenced to serious times in jail. Do you think for the inmates that are going to be released,
01:31or have been released this month and will be released again next month, as part of this
01:34process, we talked about the probation service a little bit already, but how prepared do you
01:38think they are for that? Are they going to struggle? I think they're going to struggle
01:42for three reasons. One was that Christopher Grayling, when he was the Justice Secretary,
01:47absolutely messed up. And everybody's accepted, the previous government accepted in the end
01:52that it was a total mess and he tried to privatise it. They've just about put it together, but a lot
01:58of the probation officers are new. And that doesn't mean they're no good, it just means
02:03they're inexperienced. And that makes it much more difficult for them to handle a sudden surge
02:10in the caseload, and therefore they're bound to be risk-averse, understandably, but they're also
02:17bound to be in a situation where they can't foresee what will happen. So I fear that we will
02:24get some incidents where people repeat offend. It happens anyway with people released, there's a
02:31very high level of re-offending, something like 50%. So you're going to get that whatever happens.
02:37And the question is, can we hold our nerve? And can we say, look, we've got to do it? I mean,
02:42everybody in the system acknowledges this, so nobody's actually saying there's another way at
02:48the moment. There's going to have to be another way within 18 months, two years. If you were still
02:53the Home Secretary, what would be your kind of priorities in helping to sort this? I would say
02:59instead of building even more large prisons, which are difficult to get planning consent, difficult
03:06to go through all the building processes, difficult to recruit once you've built them
03:10within a specific radius, difficult in terms of where prisoners are coming from and whether they
03:16can keep with their family, why not build a large number of small remand centres right across Britain
03:24and there'd be much less objection from the locality because these people have not been
03:28found guilty, they're not sentenced, and you could do the job very quickly. I'm hoping to persuade
03:35ministers to do that because there is money in the forward budget and I don't think there's a
03:40chance of Rachel Reeves cutting that on the 30th of October when she has her first
03:46major announcement. So the money's there, so why not use it more smartly, more effectively,
03:53more quickly than trying to build bigger prisons, which take ages to build, and then you fill them
04:00up way away from people's homes and including those on remand. So that's the first thing I'd do
04:06and then the second thing I'd do is cancel this ridiculous 28-day recall and I would also
04:14take a very strong look at the recall for the IPP, the imprisonment for public protection,
04:20and say only when someone has really committed another offence as opposed to breaching their
04:27licence should they be pulled back in and instead we have a joined-up approach at local level. I've
04:32been talking to Oliver Coppard about this as the elected mayor of South Yorkshire. How can we pull
04:38in the police for whom he's responsible with the probation service, with the court service,
04:47with other community actions, local government is one, voluntary sector are others, so that we
04:54try and get a joined-up system here locally and that's taking place in Greater Manchester under
05:00Andy Burnham and I think we can do a better job.