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About the Parole Board
The new Chief Executive, Linda Lennon, joined the Board on 14 April on secondment from Her Majesty's Courts Service. Linda's previous post was as London Area Director with responsibility for the civil and family courts.
The Annual Conference was held for the first time ever in Blackpool, at the Barcelo Imperial Hotel. The venue received mixed reviews but the conference plenary and workshop programme was a great success.
On 1 April the Generic Parole Process was formally launched, providing a single structure for the administration of the indeterminate parole process and an end-to-end delivery target.
The long-awaited amendments to the Parole Board Rules also came into force on 1 April, allowing negative decisions to be made on paper by a single member panel, ICM directions to have legal effect and prisoners to be able to request but not require an oral hearing.
The amended Rules also allowed for Parole Board members other than judicial members to chair oral hearings and the first training course for independent IPP chairs took place at Hunton Park Conference Centre.
The Board's Annual Report for 2008/09 was published, showing a decrease of 8% in the overall number of cases handled during the year, but a 9% increase in the number of oral hearing panels, up to a record of 2,757.
At the same time, the Ministry of Justice published their consultation paper 'The Future of the Parole Board' setting out the options for the future status and functions of the Board in the wake of the Court of Appeal Brooke judgment.
Following a stakeholder consultation, the Board published a protocol for victim participation in oral hearings, with detailed guidance for panel members and others on the new rules surrounding victim personal statements.
Thirty-three new members were either appointed or-reappointed following the 2009 recruitment campaign, including 17 independent members, 6 specialist members and 11 judicial members. New member training took place at Ashridge Conference Centre.
Following a widespread consultation with staff and members the Board published its formal response to the Ministry of Justice consultation paper with a call for the Parole Board to remain an independent body with sponsorship transferred to HM Courts Service.
Long-awaited Directions on recall for determinate sentence prisoners were issued by the Secretary of State and took legal effect from 15 December. These confirmed that in determinate cases the Board is directed only to address the question of release and that it is no longer the Board's role to rule on the appropriateness of recall.
The Operations Department of the Secretariat was re-organised into a Reviews Teams, responsible for all determinate and indeterminate reviews, and a Recalls Team, handling all representations against recall. The changes took effect from the New Year.
A written invitation to judges to consider joining the Board sparked a rush to apply and following a gruelling round of interviews 55 were appointed, more than doubling the number of judicial members available to the Board.
Seventeen of these new judges were immediately put through new member training to speed their availability to chair lifer oral hearing panels.
The backlog of outstanding cases reached a new high of 2,300 by the end of March. This was in spite of a record number of oral hearings being held, rising to over 250 a month.
The Post Room and Reprographics Team and the Re4Re Team underwent Lean process effectiveness reviews conducted by team members themselves. The reviews resulted in potential cost savings of £634,000; time savings of 80 days per year when handling post; and a reduction in waiting time for photocopying from 3.5 days to 0.5 days. The Re4Re Team Lean event overhauled one of the recall processes, together with our partners at the MOJs PPCS. The changes led to a reduction in processing time of over two-thirds.
Grenadier House, 99-105 Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 2DX
Telephone 0845 251 2220