The chair of the Parole Board has expressed his frustration at the government’s failure to “get a grip” on the issue of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences under the discredited imprisonment for public protection (IPP) programme.

There are 3,300 people in England and Wales on IPPs in jail with no release date, Nick Hardwick told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The scheme was abolished in 2012.

He said hundreds of prisoners were serving time several years over the minimum tariffs set for them, and many were prone to self-harm as a result.

“The levels of suicide, assault, and self-harm is unacceptably high. It’s the fault of political and policy decisions that should have been put right two years ago,” Hardwick, a former chief inspector of prisons, said.

He described IPPs as a blot on the system when he was appointed to the Parole Board post more than a year ago. Now he is urging the justice secretary, David Lidington, to introduce urgent changes of the type agreed by the former justice secretary Michael Gove before he was replaced by Liz Truss.

Hardwick said: “We need to get a grip on this problem. Michael Gove agreed to a whole series of changes and then was sacked before he had the chance to do it, when he was justice minister.”

Relatives of one prisoner on an IPP said he was suicidal after being “left to rot”. In 2006, James Ward, from Nottinghamshire, was given an IPP for arson with a minimum tariff of 10 months. Eleven years later he is still in prison with no release date after his parole hearings were repeatedly delayed.

His sister April told the BBC he was self-harming and dangerously thin.

Nick Hardwick. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Hardwick said Ward’s case illustrated the plight of many. “The description the Ward family gave of that young man is happening to hundreds and hundreds,” he said. “The prison system is simply unable to care for a prisoner with that level of need at the moment.”

He said delays in releasing prisoners on IPPs could be reduced if the onus switched to the state to prove they were a danger to the public if they were released.



Hardwick said: “Some of those delays are down to the Parole Board, but we are making good progress in putting those right. But the other main reason for the delay is that it is so difficult for somebody in that young man’s position to meet the legal test of demonstrating that they are not going to commit a serious offence in future.

“For people with a tariff or punishment part of their sentence of less than two years, the onus should be on the state to prove they are likely to commit a further offence, rather than for them to prove they are not.

“We can do something about the IPP problem without compromising the safety of the public.”

He also pointed out that scarce staff resourcing was being tied up in monitoring prisoners like Ward.

“Every prison officer you’ve got on constant watch looking at a prisoner in this situation is not somebody walking the wings, doing the rehabilitative work with other prisoners,” Hardwick said.

“If we allow resources to be drained away to this extent, then it threatens the security of us all.”

The Ministry of Justice says it is working closely with the Parole Board to process the cases as quickly as possible.



A spokeswoman said: “We are determined to address the challenge of making sure all IPP prisoners have the support they need to show they are no longer a threat to public safety ... Earlier this year, we set up a new unit focused on this and improving the efficiency of the parole process.

“This work is continuing to achieve results, with 576 IPP releases in 2016; the highest number of annual releases since the sentence became available in 2005.”