This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The Howard League for Penal Reform, Lord Blunkett and your columnist are not often in agreement, but on the subject of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences they are of one mind.
A New Labour creation, IPP sentences are life sentences for crimes that don’t deserve a life sentence (there was also “detention for public protection” — DPP — for children). At one point, 150 crimes ranging from affray to criminal damage could qualify for an IPP.
By way of example, one miscreant, Thomas White, nicked a mobile phone and was given an IPP with a minimum term (or tariff) of two years in 2012, four months before IPPs were finally abolished.
In 2025, he was moved to a psychiatric hospital, having been driven mad by his 13-year detention which shows no sign of ending. Meanwhile, phone theft is practically legal. But Thomas White may die in a cell for the offence.
IPP prisoners were meant to attend courses to prove to the parole board that they are no longer dangerous, which of course meant that many could never get out of prison because the courses weren’t available. Self-harm and suicide amongst IPP prisoners are far more common than the base rate for inmates.
Everyone who knew anything about IPP sentences, including David Blunkett, who created them, agreed that they were a bad idea.
It reflects especially badly on the many spineless ministers who have allowed it to continue
The late law lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, described IPPs as “the greatest single stain on our criminal justice system”. David Cameron abolished them in 2012.
However, no one has had the courage to do the right thing, which is to re-sentence IPP prisoners to fixed terms. Successive governments have taken the nonsensical view that, whilst IPPs are bad, should be abolished and should stay abolished, the people who happened to have received them should rot in jail unless they can jump through the many loops imposed by the same governments that think that IPPs are bad.
The political logic is clear: the public will cavil at the system if a criminal avoids prison, but it will blame the government if one re-sentenced IPP inmate commits a serious offence. It is far safer, say, to abolish the recall requirement for freed IPP inmates (which the government did two years ago) because they are already free than to re-sentence those who are still in jail.
Creative solutions have been found. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the dysfunctional body tasked with helping to correct potential miscarriages of justice, has referred a number of IPP sentences to the Court of Appeal, which has obliged by quashing the sentences on some technicality or other, always related to the trial judge failing to properly consider factors relevant to sentencing.
It is difficult to believe that judges were not thinking about the harshness of IPP sentences when finding that the sentences they were examining were — they were shocked to discover — flawed.
Yet the fact that the Court of Appeal can discover failings in sentencing almost two decades after the original sentences were passed speaks ill of English sentencing law, which has achieved monstrous dimensions without creating any consistency.
The Sentencing Act 2020 runs to 575 pages. The Sentencing Act 2026 has 100 pages. Nobody seems to really know how many pages of legally binding guidelines have been produced by the Sentencing Council.
It is not impossible to imagine a situation where there are mass referrals to the Court of Appeal (the CCRC is considering another 150 IPP and DPP sentences), which duly quashes them all on one ground or another, effecting a de facto re-sentencing of IPP prisoners without saying the dreaded r-word.
None of this is remotely creditable for anyone involved, but it reflects especially badly on all of the many spineless ministers who have allowed this injustice to continue.
It is clear that the Prime Minister does not have much political time left. If there is a part of him that wants to leave some sort of progressive lawyerly legacy, then he could do far worse than to kill IPPs and DPPs for good.
