Since June 2022, the Secretary of State has essentially reversed the approach to recommendations by the Parole Board for a person to be transferred from “closed” to “open” conditions, and taking a very long time to reach that decision. You can read more about the change in policy here.
Yet until now, the reasons for these decisions have been unclear. I had suspected that the reasons for disagreeing with the expert advice of the Board would be mainly on grounds of public confidence as this is a criteria that is applied by the Secretary of State but not the Parole Board. However, a response to my Freedom of Information request shows this is not the case. In fact, it appears that only 6 of the decisions not to accept the Parole Board’s advice are based on public confidence alone.
Instead it seems that in most cases the Secretary of State has not accepted the advice on the basis that he disagrees with the Parole Board that the transfer is “essential” to inform future decision making around risk on release and to prepare for release. The breakdown of decisions from June 2022 to 31 May 2023, shows that the Secretary of State considered 168 recommendations from the Parole Board for transfer to open conditions: 146 were declined and 22 approved.
The following shows a breakdown of the number of times that the basis for refusal of transfer to open conditions (singly or in combination) was a. risk of abscond, b. not considered essential c. public confidence d. a combination of not considered essential and public confidence.
a) risk of abscond 28
b) not considered essential 131
c) public confidence 56
d) a combination of not considered essential and public confidence 50
In each and every one of these cases the Parole Board will have made a recommendation for open conditions based on a request by the Secretary of State for its expert advice. Something seems to have gone awry. Either the Secretary of State has ceased to have confidence in the recommendations of the Board or is applying his own test in a completely different way. It is hard to tell as there is virtually no guidance as to how the “essential” and “public confidence” criteria should be applied. At best this seems to be a very poor use of resources to ask an expert body for advice and then to routinely ignore it.