Weddle, R (On the Application Of) v Secretary of State for Justice

The Secretary of State must provide indeterminate sentence prisoners, including life prisoners, with systems and resources enabling them to demonstrate reduced risk at or around tariff expiry. A breach does not require proof of a systemic failure and does not ordinarily give an individual prisoner a case-specific remedy under that duty.

Separately, the Secretary of State must act rationally when allocating rehabilitative resources and dealing with individual prisoners. It is irrational to require progress which the prisoner has no practical means of demonstrating. The duty is not an absolute obligation to make a prisoner ready for release at tariff expiry.

The claimant, a life prisoner serving a sentence for murder, sought judicial review of the Secretary of State’s continuing failure to provide a practical means by which he could address the risk arising from his extreme violence and demonstrate reduced risk for progression through prison security categories.

He could not recall the murder and had been assessed as unsuitable for the principal violence-related programmes. The Secretary of State relied on the availability of future assessments, programmes, psychological work and the fact that the claimant’s tariff would not expire until 2018. The central issues were the scope of the public law duty recognised in Walker and whether the individual treatment of the claimant was irrational.

1. Duty concerning systems and resources. The public law duty recognised in Walker, [2009] UKHL 22, applies to life sentence prisoners as well as prisoners serving IPP sentences. The Secretary of State must provide means by which indeterminate sentence prisoners can demonstrate, at or around tariff expiry, that their risk has sufficiently reduced to enable release.
2. A breach occurs where appropriate systems and resources, including reports and rehabilitative courses, are not provided. Although such a failure may be described as systemic, proof of a systemic breach is not an additional requirement. That duty is enforceable by declaration and does not confer a right to a case-specific remedy.
3. Separate rationality duty. The Secretary of State must act rationally and take relevant factors into account when allocating resources for rehabilitative programmes and when treating an individual prisoner. It would be irrational to require a prisoner to demonstrate a form of progress which is effectively impossible for him to perform. This remains a high threshold and does not impose an absolute obligation to secure release at tariff expiry.
4. The claimant could not recall the murder, and expert evidence indicated that recovery of the relevant memory was highly unlikely. The available programmes did not address his extreme violent offending, while the suggestion of future suitability for CALM or CSCP was speculative. The Secretary of State had provided no practical alternative, such as the proposed one-to-one psychological work.
5. Requiring the claimant to address extreme violence while withholding the means of doing so was irrational. The claim was not premature because progression through security categories ordinarily takes several years and needed to begin sufficiently early. The claim succeeded. No mandatory order was made, but liberty to apply was granted.

First-instance judicial review. No earlier decision in the same proceedings is stated.