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

• In Event: Sentencing 3. Alternative Sanctions

Abstract

Criminal justice reform can often be triggered by a single traumatic event. This was true of parole in England and Wales when the Parole Board took the decision in late 2017 to direct the release of the so-called ‘Black cab rapist’, John Worboys. Once news of that decision entered the public domain there was an immediate strong negative reaction across the political parties and in the media. The Government responded by introducing a raft of measures designed to restore public and political confidence in parole through greater accountability and transparency. Probably the most significant of these reforms was the creation in 2019 of a reconsideration mechanism. It allowed the Board to take a second look at provisional parole decisions after they had been made. In 2022 this was supplemented by a sister scheme which permitted final parole decisions to be set aside. By the end of December 2023 judgments on 1,002 applications ̶ 889 reconsideration and 113 set aside ̶ had either been issued or were (in a few cases) imminent. By March 2024 more than 800 of these judgments had been published. The time is therefore ripe for a comprehensive review of the way the two schemes have operated.

This paper considers the fruits of the author’s analysis ̶ the first of its kind ̶ of all published reconsideration and set aside judgments as at March 2024 as well as some unpublished decisions about which information was provided to the author by the Board. The paper opens a window not just onto how the two review mechanisms have been working but onto parole decision-making generally.

Author

• Stephen Cameron Shute, University of Sussex