Challenging Parole Decisions in England and Wales: Reconsideration and Set Aside

• In Event: Community Supervision Policy and Practice in Reentry

Abstract

The Government responded to the decision made by the Parole Board for England and Wales in late 2017 to direct the release of the so-called ‘Black cab rapist’, John Worboys, by introducing a raft of measures designed to restore public and political confidence in parole through greater accountability and transparency. The most significant of these reforms was the creation in 2019 of a reconsideration mechanism. In 2022 this was supplemented by a sister scheme which permitted final parole decisions to be set aside. More than 1,000 reconsideration and set aside applications have now been made and more than 800 of the judgments in these cases have been published. This paper considers the fruits of the author’s analysis ̶ the first of its kind ̶ of all these cases. The paper opens a window not just onto how the two review mechanisms have been working but onto parole decision-making in England and Wales generally. It examines, inter alia, the structure of the two schemes; how applications are assessed; what is in scope and what is not; the grounds presented; and the relationship with judicial review.

Author

• Stephen Cameron Shute, University of Sussex, United Kingdom