Burnham's Prison Trap

Andy Burnham’s inherited plan to free up prison capacity has run into the obvious objection: some of the people he’d release would still be considered as a risk to the public. MPs and former justice secretaries warn that scrapping IPP sentences, indeterminate terms still applied to more than 2,300 prisoners as of March 2026, according to HMPPS’s own annual report on the IPP sentence, risks putting ‘high-risk people’ back on the street. Both Labour and Conservative governments have previously resisted abolition for exactly this reason.

Burnham says he’ll legislate to end IPP sentences by the end of this parliament, which, based on the handwringing we saw this time round, may result in case-by-case reviews of who gets released and who gets an alternative sentence. That legislation now falls to Catherine McKinnell, who became Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending in July, after Lord Timpson resigned from the role shortly before Burnham took office.

Campaigners broadly support his decision. Lord Thomas, the former Lord Chief Justice, has compared IPP to the Post Office and infected blood scandals, arguing it’s time for the state to admit the mistake. Lord Blunkett, who was Home Secretary when the IPP legislation was introduced, said “It was our fault for getting it wrong.” Lord Hastings has pressed ministers in the Lords on the situation of people serving IPP sentences never released and those recalled without reoffending (we hope to have him on the BGM podcast soon to talk about this and his work with Black men in prison). The Howard League, which has long pushed for a fixed release date for all IPP prisoners, gave the announcement a cautious welcome, though chief executive Andrea Coomber warned the wider package of changes “will make it even harder to tackle the prison capacity crisis in the short term.”

He’s also performed a climbdown on the broader early release scheme. Manslaughter, death by dangerous or drunk driving, and causing or allowing the death of a child are now excluded entirely, following outrage over the prospective release of Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, jailed for 13 years in 2020 over the killing of Pc Andrew Harper. Burnham has additionally ruled out early release for historic indecent assault and grooming offences, some 500 more offenders staying inside on top of the roughly 1,000 rapists and serious child sex offenders excluded a month earlier, according to figures set out by the Institute for Government and the House of Commons Library.

The arithmetic doesn’t help him: the concessions leave a 1,500-place shortfall against the capacity the original plan, freeing around 6,000 people in prisons from 1 October, was meant to deliver.

The BM4C view

Even though this is a small part of the wider issue, we believe that had IPP sentences been fixed when it was first identified as broken, and had successive governments invested in rehabilitation pathways inside prison and in the community, alongside prevention-focused, whole-family programmes like those developed by Lib Peck’s Violence Reduction Unit at City Hall, we would not be managing a capacity crisis through emergency sentencing exemptions. The IPP scandal is another example of how siloed government thinking, coupled with weak political will, drives the kind of system crisis that has the prison, court and probation services in its grip today.

Having met Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League, we can say she brings real passion to this issue, the spirit of an activist rather than a technocrat. When we spoke, she talked with conviction about the numbers of Black boys entering the system young and returning to their communities years later as grown men, often broken men, and how little attention that travesty gets from society at large. That last point, about attention within Black communities themselves, is our observation rather than hers, drawn from conversations we’ve had with mothers and fathers of young men in jail, where it’s clear that shame has a silencing effect on families and on the wider community. Out of sight, out of mind.

That disparity is not anecdotal. As of 30 June 2024, 133 of the 1,132 people still serving an unreleased IPP sentence, 12%, were Black or Black British, according to the Ministry of Justice’s own equalities statement on the Sentencing Bill. That’s three times the roughly 4% share of the England and Wales population that group makes up, per the 2021 Census. Whatever resentencing process Burnham and McKinnell now build has to be watched closely for how it lands across ethnicity, not just for how many places it frees up.

During his two years in office Lord Timpson steered the Sentencing Act through the Lords, which is a tick for him, but the benefits for Black and Global Majority people in the criminal justice system are mixed. In BM4C’s opinion the Act helps BGM prisoners on release but does little at sentencing, while the new licence conditions and recalls fall hardest on the same people. Two years in office were not long enough to leave much more of a legislative mark. What counts for more is the work he was doing before he became prisons minister and has now gone back to: the Timpson Group’s longstanding policy of employing people leaving prison, giving them a job and a wage on release rather than a cliff edge. According to reporting by Reasons to Be Cheerful, around 12% of the company’s 5,000-strong workforce has a criminal conviction or was recruited straight from custody, some through a day-release scheme run inside the prisons themselves. That is the kind of practical, on-the-ground commitment we need to hear about more often, from him and from others doing it. Catherine McKinnell will not bring the same hands-on record, but we hope she brings the same level of commitment to real change.

There is also a whole, under-examined dimension of this to do with the numbers of women still in prison for non-violent offences, or for manslaughter after years of domestic abuse. Nearly seven in ten women in prison are known to have experienced domestic abuse, and organisations like Women in Prison and the Centre for Women’s Justice have spent years documenting how often these women are being punished rather than protected.

This is a pattern that repeats: legislation shaped without the people who live with its consequences, then corrected under pressure once the failures surface. By-and-for specialists need a standing seat at the table where sentencing and justice legislation is drafted and disproportionately impacts upon racially minoritised communities, not a consultation slot after the bill is written. Grassroots organisations working with IPP prisoners and their families, groups like UNGRIPP and the IPP Solidarity Movement, and those working specifically with women, including Women in Prison, the Centre for Women’s Justice, and Sistah Space for Black women affected by abuse, are already doing this work. They should be in the room.