There are many stains on the British justice system.

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Is this IPP's Post Office moment? Andy Burnham may be the person to provide it

The Post Office scandal, Hillsborough, the Guildford Four- the list is long, but there is one current stain which, over the past 14 years, the government has tried to scrub clean and rearrange the furniture to hide: Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP). The noises coming out of No.10 (North and South) indicate that perhaps now is the time that IPP will get the attention it deserves.

The latest government and public debates around a prison population at breaking-point and early prisoner release have pushed IPP into the public spotlight in a way that it has never been before and received more airtime and awareness than at any point in its twenty-year history - column inches, leading news stories, prime-time radio phone-ins - IPP is finally entering the national conversation. The debate has become one of morals and reality - the morality of who should be released and the realisation that something has to be done to reduce the weight on the prison system.

Prisons in England and Wales are running at 97% capacity, with fewer than 3,000 spare places against a population of 86,000, and behind that number sits another - a Crown Court backlog that has just reached a record 80,000 outstanding cases - nearly double what it was in 2019. The two sides of the debate go hand in hand - justice must be served and must continue to be served, and so a decision has to be made - who to release and why?

In recent days, Andy Burnham has pledged legislation to end the IPP sentence within this Parliament, promising freedom by 2029 for those still held, despite the sentence having been abolished in 2012. To have full knowledge of IPP is not an........

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