Parole Board chair backs overhaul of prisoner recall system in England

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Ministers should push ahead with plans to reform the prison recall system in England and Wales in order to ease staffing pressures at the independent body that assesses whether the most serious offenders are safe to be released, its outgoing chair has said.

Caroline Corby said recommendations by David Gauke, former Conservative justice secretary, to overhaul how some offenders released from custody as part of a fixed-term sentence are dealt with if they breach their licence conditions would help the Parole Board cut overall queues. 

Recalls “have just grown and grown and grown . . . each year for many years . . . and some, we were long saying, we thought could be best dealt with through executive release, because the parole process is inevitably quite slow,” she told the Financial Times.

“If somebody is recalled back to custody and actually the risk doesn’t warrant it, then an executive release is a much faster process,” Corby added, referring to the release of a prisoner by the secretary of state without a Parole Board hearing taking place. “I think there are arguments for making changes to the criminal justice system.”

Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood in May set out the biggest shake-up to penal policy in decades, including allowing some offenders to leave custody after one-third of their sentence, following a review by Gauke aimed at reducing chronic overcrowding in prisons.  

One of his proposals was for people serving standard determinate sentences — where a court sets a fixed-length term, two-fifths of which many prisoners today serve in custody — to return to jail only in the event of “consistent non-compliance with licence conditions or specific and imminent risk”. 

Noting that the number of recall prisoners had more than doubled to about 14,000 between 2018 and 2025, Gauke also called for recalled prisoners to serve a standard 56-day term before they were re-released, instead of “disruptive” 14-day and 28-day terms. Ministers accepted both proposals in principle. 

Corby, who will leave her role this week, said the changes would lead to “a benefit over time for indeterminate sentences”, which include people serving life terms, because of a shortage of trained Parole Board chairs to lead hearings.

In 2023-24, the latest year for which data is available, the body approved the release of 4,370 prisoners, recommended the transfer of 393 to open jails with minimal security, and ruled that 11,355 should remain in custody. 

The Parole Board came under heavy public fire in 2018 after judges overturned its decision to release “Black Cab rapist” John Worboys, who was convicted in 2009 for attacks on 12 women and initially given a life sentence with a minimum term of eight years.

It was also criticised for having no Black members, despite 27 per cent of the prison population being from a minority ethnic group, according to the Prison Reform Trust charity.

Corby, whose predecessor Nick Hardwick was forced to quit over the Worboys row, acknowledged that it “hit confidence in the decision-making of the Parole Board at the time” but said it also marked “an opportunity to change lots of things that we wanted to change”. 

“I have always believed we have lots to gain and nothing to lose by being more open about our work,” she said, citing moves in recent years to hold hearings in public and publish decision summaries.

Diversity “is really important, I think, for us in terms of credibility, and today 18 per cent of our members come from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background . . . in line with the most recent census of the population of England and Wales,” Corby added. “I think that’s where we should at least be.”