Following the conclusion of the Sentencing Review chaired by former Conservative Justice Minister David Gauke in May 2025, the Sentencing Bill was laid before Parliament on 3 September and in November passed to the House of Lords. It is likely to become law in 2026. Blaming its Conservative predecessors for the continued detention of spiralling numbers of prisoners, the Labour government seeks to relieve pressure on the system, while maintaining a punitive ethos. While the Bill will bring relief to some individuals, overall it will do nothing to change the vicious prison system, nor significantly reduce the number of people incarcerated. NICKI JAMESON reports.
The Bill contains a wide range of reforms to the sentencing structure, the most talked about being the provisions to recast the sentencing framework for Standard Determinate Sentences (SDS) based on the so-called ‘Texas model’.
When the Bill becomes law, prisoners serving SDS with a current halfway release point will have to spend a minimum of one third of their sentence in custody; those who currently have a two-thirds release point will have to serve a minimum of half the sentence before they can be released. Prisoners serving extended or indeterminate sentences will be unaffected by the changes.
Although the scheme is described as an ‘earned progression model’, and earlier government publicity focused strongly on this concept, in practice prisoners will not have to proactively earn early release, although they will have to stay out of trouble. If they do that successfully, they will be automatically released at the one third/one half mark. If not, they face the prospect of serving more time in custody for ‘bad behaviour’.
No new mechanism is being put in place to measure this ‘bad behaviour’. Instead, the existing ‘independent adjudicators’, who can already punish prisoners with up to 42 ‘added days’ for disciplinary offences, will see their powers to punish extended. The government factsheet states: ‘We will double the maximum number of added days per incident that an independent adjudicator can impose. The review suggests a maximum cap on time in custody; we are not imposing a cap, and prisoners could have days added until the end of their sentence.’ This worryingly harks back to the days when a similar power was vested in ‘Boards of Visitors’, who – following major prison uprisings like that at Hull prison in 1976 – meted out hundreds of days of ‘lost remission’.
Assuming prisoners manage to circumvent this and are released into the community, there will then be a period of ‘intense supervision’ for the second third of the sentence. This will include highly restrictive licence conditions and electronic monitoring. In the final third of the sentence, ‘low risk offenders’ will still be subject to licence conditions but not to active probation supervision, while probation staff will continue to monitor ‘high risk offenders’.
The Bill also contains a provision to change the recall framework, so that SDS prisoners sentenced to four years or more for non-violent, non-sexual, non-terrorist offences recalled for misdemeanours such as missing appointments (as opposed to for committing further crime) will be subject to 56-day fixed term recall periods, rather than being potentially re-detained for the whole of their sentence. A similar provision has already been introduced for those serving less than four years.
The Bill also allows for further changes to the Early Removal Scheme to allow for foreign national prisoners to be deported at any point after being sentenced. This follows a recent change in September, whereby prisoners who are not fighting deportation can now be removed up to four years before their otherwise earliest release date. This was accompanied by a predictably racist ‘rid us of foreign criminals’ fanfare, although its implementation is as ever very uneven, with some prisoners who are keen to leave not being processed for months on end.
On 18 September 2025 the prison population of England and Wales stood at 87,465. This includes 17,000 unconvicted prisoners on remand awaiting trial with lengthy court delays, and 8,493 life and indeterminate sentenced prisoners, none of whom are affected by any of the measures in the Bill. The implementation of the Sentencing Bill is projected to slow but not reverse future growth. Without the planned changes, the projected prison population in 2029 is around 100,000. With the changes it will still have risen to 90,000. While the government continues to cast itself as ‘tough on crime’, which effectively means the continued use of imprisonment as a central weapon with which to discipline and punish the working class, there will be no prospect of any real or lasting change.
