David Blunkett says devising 99-year prison sentences is his ‘biggest regret’

David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, has said devising legislation that has left people languishing in prison for minor offences is the biggest regret of his eight years at the heart of government.

Forty-six per cent of IPP prisoners have been held for 10 years or more over their tariff, with some being frequently recalled for trivial breaches of licence conditions rather than for committing a crime.

Today, more than half of the prisoners serving an IPP sentence have been recalled, many for missing appointments with probation officers, losing their place at approved premises or disclosing poor mental health.

Last week the Guardian reported on the case of Tommy Nicol, who told prison authorities that his sentence was the “psychological torture of a man doing 99 years”.

The failure of myself, and of parliament, to recognise that this additional sentence to the menu available to the judiciary should have been much more tightly drawn to preclude its application for relatively minor, if repeated, offences.”

It is necessary to anticipate the worst scenarios, and therefore what might go wrong rather than presuming, as was the case back in 2003, that everyone playing their part in the criminal justice system would act rationally, that adequate resources would be made available, and that just a few hundred rather than several thousand people would be caught up in the sentence.