13 October 2025

Modest but welcome progress in the long journey for IPP reform

Sophie Ellis and Mark Day examine what the latest government report reveals on progress to address the injustice of the IPP sentence.

At the end of July, with little fanfare, the government published its annual report on progress against its IPP action plan. The action plan is part of the Ministry of Justice’s ongoing efforts to address the challenges associated with Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences. These sentences, introduced in 2005 and abolished in 2012, continue to affect thousands of people who remain in custody or under licence in the community.

The plan is overseen by the IPP Progression Board, which meets quarterly and is supported by an External Stakeholder Challenge Group, of which the Prison Reform Trust (PRT) is a member, to ensure scrutiny and accountability. A refreshed IPP action plan, published alongside the annual report, outlines several strategic priorities and measurable targets aimed at improving outcomes for those serving IPP sentences. The government introduced a statutory requirement to publish an annual report on the action plan following representations made by Members of the House of Lords and supported by the PRT and others during the parliamentary debate on the Victims and Prisoners Bill.

What does the annual report reveal?

Despite the lack of attention it has received, the latest annual report reveals some modest but welcome progress. This includes a significant reduction in the number of people serving IPPs on licence in the community.

This welcome decline follows reforms to the IPP licence introduced by the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024. 1,742 people had their sentence ended in November 2024 — around one in five of those who ever received an IPP sentence.¹ In addition, the number of people on licence fell from 2,885 in September 2024 to 1,376 in December 2024 (a 52% decrease).²

During the last nine years, we had seen the recall population stubbornly continue to rise. However, the annual report shows that, for the first time, the IPP recall population declined steadily throughout 2024. The decline is modest: on 30 June 2025 the recall population stood at 1,508 people, down 9% from its 2023 peak.³ But the ship appears to have changed course at long last.

The report also reveals a slight decline in the number of unreleased IPP prisoners. This decline is to be expected on a legacy sentence. On 30 June 2025 there were 978 unreleased IPP prisoners.⁴ A fall below 1,000 is a cautiously encouraging milestone that once seemed unreachable. Intensive and individualised case management is surely achievable in a group of this size, and which will only ever get smaller. An effective action plan should, we hope, result in this number falling more quickly.

Other trends highlighted in the report include:

20% of IPP prisoners are not in a prison suited to their needs, down from 30% in the previous year.
The number of IPPs in secure hospitals remained steady between 2014 and 2021 at around 280 people, and has been declining since then (233 people in 2024).⁵

Changes in policy and practice

The annual report also documents some positive improvements in policy and practice relating to IPPs, including:

Significant improvements in monitoring and review processes — moving towards the sort of continual and robust scrutiny that any kind of preventative detention should receive. However, it is vital that the positive changes on paper actually translate to practice over time.
The review of all Detention for Public Protection (DPP) prisoners (the equivalent of an IPP sentence for children) — recognition of them as a distinct group is an important milestone. It will be important that focus is maintained and translates into tangible progress, including a reduction in the number of imprisoned DPPs (unreleased and recalled), and fewer recalls. With around 85 people serving a DPP sentence in 2024,⁶ every single one should be in the right prison for their needs, given their small numbers. However, in the annual report, the lack of data on the number of people serving DPP is disappointing in light of the relatively strong commitments to their progress.
Local IPP delivery plans — these are a positive step, but performance will be key. Progress against local plans could be reported to the stakeholder group for accountability, to enhance knowledge of regional variations and region-specific challenges, as well as sharing examples of good practice.
Through-the-gate support by Psychology Services and the Approved Premises pilots — these are both very positive steps, and key to supporting people on IPPs at what we know to be a very difficult time in their sentence. The evaluation of these services should monitor whether they are associated with fewer recalls, or time to recall.
Publication of the Progressive Transfers Policy Framework and Progression Panels Policy Framework.
Improvements to published data on IPPs — these are helpful and will improve transparency and accountability. We should be mindful that clearance by the Office for National Statistics is not a straightforward process. It is positive that efforts have been made to progress the publication of IPP data, much of which was called for by the stakeholder group.

But there remains much more to do…

The plan is not perfect. It needs more ambitious targets as well as a greater focus on ensuring that many of the welcome improvements in policy and practice lead to a sustained reduction in the IPP prisoner population.

Not all the data and trends revealed in the report are positive, and there are further improvements which could be made to how the government reports on progress in future. These include:

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) should allow better accountability and oversight of the assessment of risk and need for IPPs, mostly conducted by Psychology Services. This is a crucial part of sentence progression and should be subject to the same transparency and scrutiny as other elements of the management of IPPs. The update on workstream 5 (psychology) of the plan is noticeably less detailed than the other sections. Given the high-stakes nature of the IPP sentence, there should be independent scrutiny of any research used to draw conclusions about them. This is because IPP prisoners, who continue to be detained on the basis of risk, are particularly impacted by the expert power of psychologists, who determine the concepts and language used to define them.
The current success targets for reducing delays are welcome but lack sufficient ambition. Improvements should be made to the arrangements for monitoring and meaningful reporting on parole hearings and their outcomes; and self-harm and suicide in custody (and later community).
Presenting the facts that matter to people serving IPPs and those affected by them. Data on self-harm is conspicuously absent from the report, although it is available in other Ministry of Justice data sets.⁷ While the report notes that the number of IPP re-releases in 2024 was the highest ever (602 releases), examination of the underlying Parole Board data shows that the re-release rate has remained broadly unchanged since 2019 (around 70%).⁸ More releases is positive (unless that merely arises from there being more recalls), but prisoners also want to know about their chances.

The importance of ongoing communication

Despite some welcome efforts by HMPPS, effective communication about the action plan with people serving IPPs is still lacking. Our conversations with IPP prisoners and the staff who work with them highlight how vital communication is for sustaining hope.

Many staff work hard to support the prisoners in their care but often feel helpless in the face of what they cannot change. Prisoners, meanwhile, live with a deeper hopelessness: endless delays, bureaucratic hurdles, and the reality of being held without a release date. Even so, we are starting to see more empathy from staff, greater recognition of the damage caused by the IPP sentence, and constructive partnerships with IPP peer mentors.

Yet communication still falls short. Prisoners are often unaware of developments that affect them directly—such as the change in direction of the recall population, the generally high re-release rate for recalls, or new provisions for DPP prisoners. Staff, too, are not always told about work happening in other prisons, missing chances to learn and support one another.

When people only see the bleak circumstances of their own experiences and those of their wing peers, sharing meaningful changes, while acknowledging ongoing suffering, provides a crucial support for maintaining hope. As does spreading best practice between prisons. Public accountability matters, but accountability to prisoners matters most, When their lives and futures are so intricately bound to reforms, IPP prisonwers deserve clear and timely communication about policy changes, key data, and what is working on the ground.

We are also aware of the immense variability in the action plan’s implementation. IPP prisoners we have spoken with have shared a wide range of opinions from “the plan is meaningless and nothing’s changing” to “I’ve never got so much attention and had so many things sorted since I got my sentence”. Clearly the message has landed in some prisons more than others, and we suspect variation in Workstream 3 (Staff Development and Awareness) may be responsible.

The only game in town

But no matter what the efforts are in one prison or all, as an operational document, the action plan is also limited in what it can ultimately achieve. The only way to bring the IPP sentence definitively to an end is through further legislation, either through resentencing or a sunset clause. Yet currently, there seems to be precious little appetite in government for either.

For now, the IPP action plan remains the only game in town. Despite its limitations, it is better to have the oversight and accountability afforded by the plan than nothing at all. Although the progress outlined in the annual report is modest, it is nonetheless welcome, even if we would like the government to go further. In the meantime, translating the plan from new policies (good), to new practices (emerging but uneven), to tangible results (promising but a long way to go) is something all of us—officials and the wider criminal justice sector—owe to the people still suffering from the stain of the IPP sentence.

Sophie Ellis is research manager and Mark Day is deputy director at the Prison Reform Trust