David Shipley

When the Ministry of Justice announced that the government would introduce emergency legislation this week to stop ‘two tier’ Sentencing Council guidelines being implemented, the Lord Chancellor may have hoped that her swift action would bring this story to a close. But today the debate over ‘two-tier’ justice has widened, with the Telegraph reporting this morning that ‘ethnic minority criminals are being given priority by judges considering bail under new two-tier justice guidelines drawn up by the Ministry of Justice.’ When someone has been is charged with a crime they are either held on remand, in a prison, or are bailed. When on bail conditions apply. After I was charged with fraud in October 2018, I was on bail until being sentenced in February 2020.

Two RAF engineers were spared jail today, after pleading guilty to vandalising a statue of Paddington Bear in the Berkshire town of Newbury. The young, drunk servicemen broke the Peruvian bear in half and then transported his front façade back to RAF Odiham in a taxi. Later jars of marmalade, sandwiches and poems were left at the crime scene by members of the public A few decades ago perhaps the bear’s disappearance would have remained a mystery, his fate known only to those who frequented the station’sbar. Unfortunately for Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, the two guilty men, Newbury’s CCTV captured their entire escapade. They were soon apprehended, with Paddington found by police in Lawrence’s car.

Tommy Robinson has lost his attempt to force the prison service to move him out of segregation. Robinson's lawyers said he is being held in ‘inhuman’ and ‘degrading’ conditions at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes. But the High Court ruled that Robinson, also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was being kept away from other prisoners for his own safety. Robinson is actually rather lucky: in many ways, his treatment behind bars is far better than the typical inmate receives Robinson's supporters have reacted with predictable fury. Are they right to be angry? Is Robinson the victim of a justice system determined to crush his will, which is treating him far more harshly than it does other prisoners?

The Sentencing Council – the organisation that advises judges on how long convicted criminals should be locked up for – has hit back at criticism from the Justice Secretary. Shabana Mahmood challenged the Council’s apparent embrace of ‘two-tier justice’ last week, after it told judges to order a pre-sentence report (PSR) if an offender is from a minority background. Lord Justice William Davis, the Council's chair, has now responded – and has doubled down on its new guidance to judges. Davis said that Mahmood and her officials had been briefed in advance about the instructions on sentencing offenders from ethnic minorities. He also said that ministers could not "dictate" sentencing and vowed to take legal advice.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has accused his Labour counterpart Shabana Mahmood of not believing in ‘equality under the law’ and ‘enshrining’ a ‘double standard’ over who is, and isn't, sent to prison. The accusations against Mahmood – and the Labour government – came after new guidelines from the Sentencing Council were published, which appear to make prison less likely for ‘ethnic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘faith’ minorities who are convicted of crimes. This shake-up appears driven by a belief that the justice system is biased against minorities The Sentencing Council's updated rules state that, for a number of groups, the assumption should be in favour of a pre-sentence report (PSR).

There are just over a thousand men’s prison places left in the UK out of a total of 88,618 total. Where does the government go from here? Are our prisons about to run out of space? If they do, will we see even earlier releases? To put these figures from the start of the week in context, in August 2024 there were only around 700 spaces available. In the aftermath of the Summer riots there were concerns that courts might have to stop jailing people. Disaster was only averted by the government’s early release scheme, SDS40, under which thousands of additional prisoners were released in September and October. Meanwhile, David Gauke’s Sentencing Review has been underway since October, and has described our prisons as ‘on the brink of collapse’.

Former justice secretary David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), running since October, was not due to report until the spring. However, following the latest published prison population statistics, which showed there are only just over 1,000 spaces left in men’s prisons and soaring numbers for serious further offences, an interim report has been published. It makes for revolutionary reading. As Gauke says, he is confronting ‘the consequences of decades of haphazard policy making and underinvestment in the criminal justice system – bringing it to the brink of collapse.’ Our justice system catches and jails fewer people, yet the prison population continues to soar. Why?

Now that the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been sentenced for his horrific crimes, we can try to understand how he was free to kill, and what can be done to stop crimes like this in the future. Between 2019 and 2021, this young man was referred three times to Prevent, the counter-extremism programme. On each occasion they took no further action. Yesterday the government released a redacted version of the ‘learning review’ conducted by Prevent, carried out in the wake of Rudakubana's attack. It’s a limited piece of work, and far from the full public inquiry we need. The reviewer wasn’t able to interview anyone involved, so limited their investigation to information stored on Prevent’s database.

The details of the terrible murder of Sarah Mayhew are almost too appalling to bear, but one question stands out most of all: why was the convicted murderer who killed her free to take Sarah's life? Sansom had murdered before, when he was just 19 Sarah, a 38-year-old mother of two, was lured to a flat in south London last March and never seen again. Steve Sansom and his partner, Gemma Watts, killed Sarah in a manner which involved sexual and sadistic conduct. The killers had previously exchanged messages detailing a desire to kill people with a knife or knives while engaged in sexual activity. After's Sarah's murder, the couple dismembered her and dumped her remains in different locations around London.

Southport killer Axel Rudakubana will serve a minimum of 52 years in prison for the horrific murder of three young girls. But despite the lengthy sentence handed to the teenager at Liverpool Crown Court today, it's hard to say that justice has been served. Rudakubana should die behind bars, yet the law prevented the judge, Mr Justice Goose, from handing Rudakubana a whole-life sentence. It is possible that Rudakabana will be a free man at the age of 70. This is abhorrent. To see why the possibility that Rudakubana may ever be released is such a grave injustice, it's worth revisiting the horrific details of the case. It is possible that Rudakabana will be a free man at the age of 70. This is abhorrent Rudakubana planned his murders.

‘The Amazon Killer’, screams the Sun front page today. ‘Total disgrace he was able to buy knife on Amazon,’ says the Daily Mirror. The backlash to the news that Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana brought his weapon online has been swift. But blaming Amazon for what happened on that horrific day last summer is missing the point. Rudakubana admitted to carrying a knife ten times Rudakubana, who was 17 when he attacked a group of children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in July, was a troubled individual who had a history of carrying knives. His guilty plea this week has meant that details of his case – and the shocking failure of the state to stop him – have emerged.

Britain should move thousands of inmates into low-security open prisons, according to David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, who is chairing the government’s Sentencing Review. Gauke's comments have sparked a predictably furious backlash, but he's absolutely correct – and I should know. Locking someone up costs the public about £52,000 per prison place each year “We don’t make as much use of open prisons as we might do,” says Gauke, who thinks open prisons might be the answer to addressing the prison overcrowding crisis and reducing reoffending. The reality is that open prisons are one of the few parts of the justice system that work well. It makes sense to make better use of them.

What is the British Transport Police playing at? Biologically male officers identifying as female will be allowed to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC). The guidance, which was revealed by the Daily Telegraph, shows that the police aren’t quick to learn lessons when it comes to resolving the question of who should, and shouldn’t, be allowed to search female suspects. Imagine a vulnerable woman being told that an officer who is male is going to strip search her The trouble is that, while a GRC allows trans people to have their ‘acquired gender’ legally recognised in the UK, it remains the case that a person cannot change their biological sex. A GRC is a document issued to make things easier for trans people.

Two recently-released prisoners have lifted the lid on corruption and sexual harassment in Britain's prisons. Beatrice Auty, who was imprisoned for money laundering, said that she was harassed by a male prison officer at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey. A former officer, Lee Davis, who spent two years in prison for corruption, also told the BBC of a culture where staff routinely use their knowledge of security measures to smuggle contraband inside. It doesn’t take many officers who don't follow the rules to undermine the entire system The company that runs HMP Bronzefield, said that, while it cannot comment on individual cases, 'where complaints are received about any employee, we undertake all appropriate investigations and take necessary actions as needed'.

Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its annual report on crime in England and Wales. This combines data on crimes reported to the police and the Crime Survey for England and Wales to produce the best estimate of how much crime is being committed. It makes for grim reading. While overall crime is up 10 per cent, some offences have soared. Robbery is up from an estimated 60,000 incidents last year to an estimated 139,000 this year, although the ONS say they prefer to use the police reported figures for robbery which show a rise of 6 per cent, from 77,106 to 81,931. Meanwhile, violence with injury is estimated to have risen from 376,000 to 562,000 (a 49 per cent increase). Shoplifting has risen by 29 per cent to reach a record high, of 469,788 offences.

September’s tranche of early releases did not go as smoothly as the government might have hoped. Footage of delighted prisoners celebrating outside jails, or saying ‘I’m a lifelong Labour voter now’ will, no doubt, resurface in Reform’s local election campaign videos in the spring. Then there was Amari Ward, the man who allegedly sexually assaulted a woman within minutes of his release (a charge he denies), and the subsequent discovery that he, and 36 other men who’d been jailed for breaching restraining orders, had been released in error. Compounding this sense of disorder was the discovery that Serco, the Ministry of Justice’s outsourced ‘tagging’ provider, had been failing to tag prisoners for weeks after release.