Lord Chancellor to give evidence to Lords Committee

Tomorrow the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee will be questioning the Rt Hon. Alex Chalk MP, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, as part of its inquiry into community sentences.

The Committee is asking a wide range of questions on topics that fall under the Lord Chancellor’s portfolio, including on prison capacity, the resources of the Probation Service, and the Government’s policy on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Possible questions include:

• What guarantees can you provide to us, and to foreign judicial authorities, that ECHR minimum standards are met in prisons in England and Wales?
• If community sentences are to be used more to reduce the prison population, how will you ensure that they are as effective as they can be? Will the increased recourse to Community Sentence Treatment Requirements be accompanied with an increase in funding for treatment service providers?
• Can the Probation Service cope with an increased workload? What is the recruitment target for the 2023-24 financial year, and what steps are you taking to increase retention?
• Will the Victims and Prisoners Bill be used as a vehicle to introduce an obligation that defendants appear in the dock to be sentenced?
• Since June 2022, the powers of the Secretary of State for Justice to oppose the move to open prison of those serving indeterminate sentences have changed. How do you exercise this responsibility? How do you envisage exercising the additional powers, in relation to Parole, that would be conferred upon you by the Victims and Prisoners Bill?
• What view have you taken about the recommendations by the Justice Select Committee on IPP prisoners? How can IPP prisoners demonstrate that they can be released safely, and what support is available to them?
• What are the latest developments on the UK’s application to the Lugano Convention?

The session can be followed live on Wednesday 25 October from 10:30am on Parliament TV.