Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollert, and this week we're taking a look at sentences of imprisonment for public protection, so-called IPPs, a controversial scheme that was meant to deal with serious offenders who posed a significant risk of serious harm to the public,

but instead has been labelled a unique injustice.

As having been abolished in 2012, there are still thousands of people subject to them.

On the panel would be to discuss them are Sir Bob Neal,

Conservative MP and chair of the Justice Select Committee in the Commons,

Baroness Lorelei Burt, a Libdae MP and campaigner, and Mark Day, deputy director of the Prison Reform Trust.

So I'm going to start with you, Mark, actually. Just explain to us what exactly IPPs are,

how they came about, and why were they scrapped?

Certainly, the IPP sentence is a form of indeterminate sentence.

It was introduced in the 2003 Criminal Justice Act and enacted in 2005.

Essentially, it is the same as a life sentence in that there is an original tariff set,

the length of which is imposed by the court for the purposes of punishment.

After that tariff has been served, release is determined by the parole board.

Someone can only be released if they are judged by the

board not to present a significant risk to the public on release. But even when someone is released,

they are subject to licensed conditions and can be recalled back to custody for breach of those

conditions. The main difference between an IPP sentence and a life sentence

is that the licence can be reviewed and potentially terminated at the 10-year point. That is the

only difference really between an IPP and a life sentence. But I suppose as well as to the type of offences people

go to prison for for an IPP were much different to what people generally get a life sentence for.

There were a lot lesser original offences, weren't they, essentially? That's correct. So essentially

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