David Gauke calls for end to ‘sentencing bidding war’ between parties as he is appointed to lead MoJ prison policy review
Good morning. Michael Howard was Conservative leader at one point, and was instrumental in ensuring that David Cameron succeeded him in that job, but perhaps he will be best remembered for his time as home secretary in the 1990s, when he gave a speech that summed up criminal justice policy for the next three decades. He told the Tory conference:
Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists – and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice … This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.
And, around that time, the prison population in England and Wales started to soar. The election of a Labour government did not make any difference to this trend; Howardism prevailed.
Today, is that all going to change? As Rajeev Syal reports in our overnight story, to coincide with the 1,100 more criminals being let out as part of the early release policy introduced by Labour to deal with the jail overcrowding crisis, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is announcing a review of sentencing policy, which will be carried out by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary. It will consider alternatives to sending people to jail.
The Ministry of Justice’s press release about the review is here. And the terms of refererence are here.
Mahmood has been giving interviews this morning and it has been notable that she has not been declaring war on the Michael Howard approach. The Ministry of Justice says that one of the principles behind the sentencing review is to “make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public” and it says the government is committed to creating 14,000 more prison places. Although the review will consider “tougher punishments outside of prison”, the terms of reference also imply sentences should go up for offences against women and girls.
On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson asked Mahmood to clarify how radical she was being. Did she just want to curb the rate at which the prison population was going up? Or did she want fewer people to be jailed, and Britain to stop being “the European leader in locking people up”? In her reply, Mahmood rather fudged it, implying she wanted both. She said:
Well, the problem is that the rate of increase is such that nobody can keep up with demand, and you risk running out of prison places … We reach critical capacity again by next summer. We cannot build our way out of this crisis.
To put it in context, I have HMP Birmingham in my constituency. That’s a very large, older Victorian prison. It has a capacity of over 1,000. We need to build nearly five of those every single year to keep up with demand. So we do have to manage demand into the prison system.
But for a period it’s obvious that demand is going to go up, because we are going to have to build those 14,000 places. If we don’t, we run out of prison places earlier than we would expect.
The crisis is so acute that all of these things, building more supply, dealing with demand, have to be part of the solution.
But in the end, the sentencing review is our best opportunity to set a new trajectory where we can manage that demand, where I can make sure we never run out of prison places again, where there is a prison place for everyone who needs to be locked up, and where we expand the range of punishments outside of prison.
But Gauke himself has been a bit more willing to denounce Howardism. He has written an article for the New Statesman about the sentencing review and he says he wants to use it to end the “sentencing bidding war” between political parties. He says:
For the last 30 years, there has been a sentencing bidding war between the political parties seeking to compete to be seen as the toughest on crime by promising ever-longer prison sentences. Rightly, the public expects criminality to be punished and prison is often viewed as the only effective means of punishment. But the capacity crisis in our prisons has meant that – at the very least – we have no choice but to pause the increase in the prison population. It is also sensible that we now look more broadly at the evidence and ask whether sentencing policy should be more fundamentally reformed. By next spring, we should have the answer.
There will be a lot more on this as the day goes on.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the sentencing review.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. I’m still using X and I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly. I’m also trying Bluesky (@andrewsparrowgdn) and Threads (@andrewsparrowtheguardian).
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Key events
Shabana Mahmood says errors that affected first round of early prison releases in September now ‘ironed out’
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said that mistakes that affected the first set of early prisoner releases under Labour should have been “ironed out” ahead of the second round take place today.
In an interview with Times Radio, she said that 37 prisoners were released by mistake when around 1,700 inmates were released early in September. She went on:
All 37 were returned to custody, and that operational part of the system actually ended up working exactly as it should.
But those mistakes have now been ironed out, and I’m confident that the releases taking place will now be exactly as we need them to be, and victims who are required to be notified will be notified.
Mahmood also said that the rates of recall for prisoners released early were “broadly in line” with usual prison releases.
Speaking on LBC, she said:
We’ll do a statistics release in due course, as we normally would, on rates of recall and on reoffending in our prison estate.
What I can tell you is our early assessment is that the rates of recall and potential reoffending in the cohort that has been released as a result of the emergency release measures is broadly in line with what we would expect.
Paul Brand from ITV says, if the government thinks that, by getting David Gauke to carry out the sentencing review, they will get the Conservatives support for it, they will probably be disappointed. He has posted this on social media.
Govt hopes by appointing Gauke – a former Tory Justice Sec (tho admittedly a centrist in today’s party) – they can get cross-party agreement on sentencing reform. But it’s likely Tory leadership candidates will say Labour being soft on criminals, and on the political debate goes.
David Gauke calls for end to ‘sentencing bidding war’ between parties as he is appointed to lead MoJ prison policy review
Good morning. Michael Howard was Conservative leader at one point, and was instrumental in ensuring that David Cameron succeeded him in that job, but perhaps he will be best remembered for his time as home secretary in the 1990s, when he gave a speech that summed up criminal justice policy for the next three decades. He told the Tory conference:
Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists – and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice … This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.
And, around that time, the prison population in England and Wales started to soar. The election of a Labour government did not make any difference to this trend; Howardism prevailed.
Today, is that all going to change? As Rajeev Syal reports in our overnight story, to coincide with the 1,100 more criminals being let out as part of the early release policy introduced by Labour to deal with the jail overcrowding crisis, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is announcing a review of sentencing policy, which will be carried out by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary. It will consider alternatives to sending people to jail.
The Ministry of Justice’s press release about the review is here. And the terms of refererence are here.
Mahmood has been giving interviews this morning and it has been notable that she has not been declaring war on the Michael Howard approach. The Ministry of Justice says that one of the principles behind the sentencing review is to “make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public” and it says the government is committed to creating 14,000 more prison places. Although the review will consider “tougher punishments outside of prison”, the terms of reference also imply sentences should go up for offences against women and girls.
On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson asked Mahmood to clarify how radical she was being. Did she just want to curb the rate at which the prison population was going up? Or did she want fewer people to be jailed, and Britain to stop being “the European leader in locking people up”? In her reply, Mahmood rather fudged it, implying she wanted both. She said:
Well, the problem is that the rate of increase is such that nobody can keep up with demand, and you risk running out of prison places … We reach critical capacity again by next summer. We cannot build our way out of this crisis.
To put it in context, I have HMP Birmingham in my constituency. That’s a very large, older Victorian prison. It has a capacity of over 1,000. We need to build nearly five of those every single year to keep up with demand. So we do have to manage demand into the prison system.
But for a period it’s obvious that demand is going to go up, because we are going to have to build those 14,000 places. If we don’t, we run out of prison places earlier than we would expect.
The crisis is so acute that all of these things, building more supply, dealing with demand, have to be part of the solution.
But in the end, the sentencing review is our best opportunity to set a new trajectory where we can manage that demand, where I can make sure we never run out of prison places again, where there is a prison place for everyone who needs to be locked up, and where we expand the range of punishments outside of prison.
But Gauke himself has been a bit more willing to denounce Howardism. He has written an article for the New Statesman about the sentencing review and he says he wants to use it to end the “sentencing bidding war” between political parties. He says:
For the last 30 years, there has been a sentencing bidding war between the political parties seeking to compete to be seen as the toughest on crime by promising ever-longer prison sentences. Rightly, the public expects criminality to be punished and prison is often viewed as the only effective means of punishment. But the capacity crisis in our prisons has meant that – at the very least – we have no choice but to pause the increase in the prison population. It is also sensible that we now look more broadly at the evidence and ask whether sentencing policy should be more fundamentally reformed. By next spring, we should have the answer.
There will be a lot more on this as the day goes on.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the sentencing review.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. I’m still using X and I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly. I’m also trying Bluesky (@andrewsparrowgdn) and Threads (@andrewsparrowtheguardian).
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos (no error is too small to correct). And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
