PA Media has snapped this. An injunction temporarily blocking the government from concluding its negotiations over the Chagos Islands should be discharged, a high court judge has said. In the Commons Mahmood has just restated her belief that these plans will lead to a huge reduction in the number of female prisoners. This is what the independent sentencing review report says on this topic. In the year ending June 2024, 77% of women sentenced to custody received a sentence of 12 months or less. Third sector organisations informed the Review through engagement that for many women, custody is not the right place due to their vulnerabilities (such as being victims of crime themselves) or because they pose low-level of risk to the public. The rate of self-harm incidents in the female estate is stark: from December 2023 to December 2024, the rate of self-harm was nine times higher in women’s prisons (6,056 incidents per 1,000 prisoners) than men’s prisons (687 incidents per 1,000 prisoners). The Farmer Review (2019) also established that relationships are women’s most prevalent criminogenic need. Family relationships can be damaged when women are given short custodial sentences, particularly as women are often housed far away from home, making it difficult and costly to maintain relationships. The Review’s recommendations in chapter three promote the use of custody as a last resort. Recommendation 3.1, to legislate to ensure the use of short custodial sentences are only used in exceptional circumstances, will encourage women to be diverted from custody to more effective sanction and support. In encouraging a reduction in the use of short sentences, the Review aims to reduce the harm that female offenders may experience. The government says it is going to introduce “a presumption against custodial sentences of less than a year – in favour of tough community sentences that better punish offenders and stop them reoffending”. The Gauke report says women comprise only 4% of the prison population. But it also says 60% of women in jail, or under supervision, say they have been victims of domestic abuse. Charlotte Nichols (Lab) asked Mahmood how many future offences could be prevented by chemical castration. She said this would only apply to people who have already offended, implying that the impact might be limited. Mahmood said studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60% reduction in offending. She accepted that this might not help with sexual offenders whose offending is motivated primarly by power. But for other offenders, primarly motivated by sexual compulsion, it could have a “big and positive impact”, she said. Mahmood said studies looking chemical castration have been taking place for years, but she said her Tory predecessors were not very interested. She was different, she suggested. “I’m not squeamish about taking these further measures,” she said. Back in the Commons Desmond Swayne (Con) complained that that current sentences are a “fiction” because the amount of time spent in jail is much less than the sentence read out in court. He said these reforms would make this worse. Mahmood said that Swayne was wrong, and that David Gauke, who wrote the report, agrees with Swayne about the importance of transparency in sentencing. One of the recommendations in the Gauke report says: Government should consider how to make sentencing outcomes as explicit and unambiguous as possible, perhaps through a combination of guidance, national and tailored communications and engagement. Here is the Ministry of Justice’s news release summing up its response to the Gauke review on sentencing. Mahmood tells MPs that the Gauke proposals will lead to “a huge reduction in the number of women going to prison”. She goes on: Approximately two thirds go in for sentences of less than one year. Many of those women are victims of domestic abuse. In future, we expect the numbers to drop very, very significantly, and I know we will make progress in that regard. Josh Babarinde, the Liberal Democrats’ justice spokesperson, said his party would be pushing for guarantees that domestic abusers would be excluded from the early release provisons. But, overall, he was supportive of the government, and he condemned the Tories for playing politics with this issue. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, responded to Mahmood’s statement. He restated his claim that the government is decriminalising some offences. (See 9.24am.) He told MPs: Should violent and prolific criminals be on the streets or behind bars? I think they should be behind bars. For all the Justice secretary’s rhetoric, the substance of her statement could not be clearer. She’s OK, her party is OK, with criminals terrorising our streets and tormenting our country. In response, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, said the Tories should be apologosing for leaving the prison system “on the verge of collapse”. Much of what is in the sentencing review has been well trailed in advance, but it also contained a plan to extend the use of chemical castration. This made the Sun splash today. This is a useful piece of news management because the Sun has devoted far more space to the chemical castration plan, which is likely to affect a small number of offenders, and far less space to the main thrust of the plan, offenders spending less time in jail, which is likely to affect far more people and which runs counter to the Sun’s default ‘lock ‘em all up’ approach to penal policy. This is what Mahmood said about the plan in her statement. The review has recommended we continue a pilot of so-called medication to manage problematic sexual arousal. I will go further with a national roll out, beginning in two regions covering 20 prisons, and I am exploring whether mandating the approach is possible. Of course, it is vital that this approach is taken alongside psychological interventions that target other causes of offending, power and control. Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is making a statement to MPs now about the findings of the sentencing review, and the government’s response to it. (See 9.24am.) She started by pointing out that a year ago today Rishi Sunak called the general election. She said that Sunak called the election then because the prisons were full, and he was about to have to implement an early release scheme. The Home Office report on asylum figures also reveals that the proportion of claims being granted at initial decison has fallen below 50%. The rate was 61% in the year ending March 2024, but fell to 49% in the year ending March 2025. Commenting on these figures, Louise Calvey, executive director at Asylum Matters, a charity, said this means refusal rates are “extremely high”. She went on: The problem becomes extremely clear once you dig into the figures: for example, we’ve seen over 4,000 refusals of Afghan nationals in the last six months under this government, up from just over 700 in the last six months. People fleeing from a country that is quite clearly unsafe, with obvious protection needs, are being refused at huge rates. The government appears to be trying to clear the backlog with fast refusals, but when almost half of refused claims are granted on appeal, it seems shoddy and rushed decision making is leaving people who could be getting on with rebuilding their lives trapped in limbo, banned from working, often trapped in hotels, while simply shifting the backlog figures into a different column on a spreadsheet. Asylum claims were at a record level in the year ending March 2025, reaching 109,000, according to Home Office figures published today. The Home Office says: -109,000 people claimed asylum in the year ending March 2025, relating to 85,000 cases, 17% more than in the year ending March 2024 and higher than the previous recorded peak of 103,000 in 2002 -the number of people claiming asylum has almost doubled since 2021 -in 2024, just under a third of asylum seekers had arrived in the UK on a small boat and slightly more than a third had travelled to the UK on a visa -in 2024 the UK received the fifth largest number of asylum seekers in the EU+, after Germany, Spain, Italy and France Catherine McKinnell, an education minister, has told MPs that the government will announce the pay award for teachers in England this afternoon. It will be announced in the form of a written statement. McKinnell said: This afternoon we will announce the teachers pay award, which will be the earliest announcement for a decade, because we understand the importance of giving schools certainty, giving them time to plan their budgets and ensuring they can recruit and retain the expert teachers our children need. The secretary of state’s written ministerial statement will be coming out this afternoon. She was responding to an urgent question tabled by the shadow education secretary, Laura Trott, who said it was “outrageous” that ministers were not willing to reveal the pay award figure in the chamber this morning. She said: This is absolutely outrageous. It is astonishing that we’ve had to summon the government to the benches today and they can’t even tell us what pay rise they’re going to get and whether it’s going to be funded. That is not allowing us to scrutinise this in this house. All of this in the final two weeks that headteachers up and down the country have to decide whether to make teachers redundant in time for September. In fact, sadly, many schools will have already made a difficult decision to let good teachers go. These are job losses on her watch due to her inability to provide schools with the clarity that they need. Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, has posted a message on social media claiming that the injunction blocking the Chagos Islands deal is a “humiliation” for Keir Starmer. Labour’s Chagos Surrender Deal is bad for our defence and security interests, bad for British taxpayers and bad for British Chagossians. Today’s legal intervention is a humiliation for Keir Starmer and David Lammy. A high court hearing over a last-minute block on the government from concluding its deal on the Chagos Islands has begun, PA Media reports. PA says the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, before Mr Justice Chamberlain, began shortly after 10.35am. The hearing comes after an injunction was granted by a different judge at 2.25am. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has posted a message on social media condemning the killing of two Israeli embassy staff in Washington. He said: Horrified by the killing of two Israeli Embassy staff in DC. We condemn this appalling, antisemitic crime. Our thoughts are with the victims, their families and colleagues at this awful time. The Conservative party needs to “get moving” with new policies or risk being cut adrift in a social media-informed world where people make up their minds quickly, Robert Jenrick has said. Peter Walker has the story. Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent. Keir Starmer as yet unspecified U-turn on winter fuel payment (WFP) came on the same day at the Scottish Labour candidate for the crucial Hamilton byelection admitted that the issue was coming up regularly on the doorstep and two days after first minister and SNP leader John Swinney confirmed that a universal pension age winter heating payment of at least £100 will be introduced for Scottish pensioners from St Andrew’s day, 30 November. In Scotland, the winter fuel payment was replaced with the pension age winter heating payment (PAWHP) last year, as part of the devolution of welfare powers, and the Scottish government announced it would reintroduce universal payments last November, in a bid to outstrip Labour ahead of the Holyrood elections. Under the Scottish government’s plans for the winter, every pensioner household will receive £100, and some will receive £200 or £300 depending on their age and means, with around one million pensioners are expected to benefit. Labour canvassers in Hamilton – where there is panic that the party might be pushed into third place by Reform – says that winter fuel is coming up constantly with voters angry at Starmer and Rachel Reeves as they struggle to get traction on more local issues. This morning on BBC Radio Scotland, the Scottish government’s social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said: Pensioners elsewhere in the UK are still worrying about whether they’re going to get this winter fuel payment or not, while Scotland’s pensioners don’t have to.” Your payments will arrive because the Scottish government already stepped in and we didn’t wait for Labour to flip-flop and finally change its mind. She added that her government was still waiting to see the details of the announcement and who it will apply to before confirming where the Barnet consequentials from it will go. The Conservatives are taking the credit for the near-50% fall in net migration. They say it is the changes to visa rules that they introduced that brought the numbers down. This is from Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary. Net migration has halved - dropped by 430,000 - in 2024 compared to 2023 This is thanks to measures put in place by the last Conservative Government But it is still far too high and needs to go down further. That is why we need a binding annual immigration cap, set by Parliament - at much, much lower levels But when we Conservatives tabled that plan, Labour voted against it last week and again yesterday The ONS says confirms that changes to visa rules introduced by the last government have been a key factor. (See 9.40am.) James Cleverly, the home secretary who introduced those visa changes, has posted this on social media. This drop is because of the visa rule changes that I put in place. Labour will try to claim credit for these figures but they criticised me at the time, and have failed to fully implement the changes. British Future, a thinktank that covers race, identity and migration, commissioned polling carried out at the start of May that asked people, among other things, if they expected net migration to go up or down when the next ONS figures came out. Most people thought the headline rate would rise, and only 10% said they expected it to fall. Sunder Katwala, director of the thinktank, says that, even though this reducation is largely a result of the measures introduced by the last Conservative government, the fact that people will be surprised may give Keir Starmer the chance to be more pragmatic. In a statement he says: This significant fall in net migration will surprise 90% of the public, who expected numbers to keep going up. So Keir Starmer is in the unusual position for a PM of having exceeded expectations on immigration – though largely by not cancelling measures introduced by his predecessors. That gives him an opportunity to take a more pragmatic approach, managing the pressures and keeping the gains of immigration – rather than competing in a political auction over which party can pretend to eliminate it. Here is the Home Office report on people arriving in the UK irregularly in the year ending in March 2025. Most of these were people arriving on small boats. This chart shows the most common nationalities of people arriving irregularly. The Home Office has also released a whole raft of data relating to immigration, asylum, resettlement and returns. The various tables and reports are all here. I will post the highlights shortly. This is from the Migration Observatory, a migration thinktank based at Oxford University, on the ONS figures. They don’t normally get this excited about anything … Blimey. Long term net migration down by almost 50% to 431,000. Massive decline - we’ve expected this for a while... Here is the chart from the ONS report showing what has happened to net migration. Commenting on the net migration figures (see 9.38am), Mary Gregory, director of population statistics at the Office for National Statistics, said: Our provisional estimates show net migration has almost halved compared with the previous year, driven by falling numbers of people coming to work and study, particularly student dependants. This follows policy changes brought in restricting visa applications. There has also been an increase in emigration over the 12 months to December 2024, especially people leaving who originally came on study visas once pandemic travel restrictions to the UK were eased. Net migration fell by almost 50% in 2024, compared to the previous year, the Office for National Statistics has said. In a report out this morning, it says: Long-term net migration is down by almost 50%. The number of people immigrating minus the number of people emigrating is provisionally estimated to be 431,000 in year ending (YE) December 2024, compared with 860,000 a year earlier. This change is driven by a decrease in immigration from non-EU+ nationals, where we are seeing reductions in people arriving on work- and study-related visas, and an increase in emigration over the 12 months to December 2024, especially people leaving who originally came on study visas once pandemic travel restrictions to the UK were eased. The provisional estimate for total long-term immigration for YE December 2024 is 948,000, a decrease of almost a third from the revised YE December 2023 estimate of 1,326,000 and the first time it has been below 1 million since YE March 2022. The provisional estimate for total long-term emigration for YE December 2024 is 517,000, an increase of around 11% compared with the previous year (466,000). Emigration is now at a similar level to YE June 2017. A high court judge has blocked the UK government from concluding its deal to hand over the Chagos Islands with an injunction granted in the early hours of this morning, Eleni Courea reports. Good morning. Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is today announcing plans intended to reduce the amount of time offenders spend in jail. It is not a surprise – the main proposals have been on the table for some time – but it is still a big change from the way governments of all parties have run penal policy over the past few decades. Britain jails more people than most other countries in western Europe and recently sentences have been getting longer. Mahmood appointed David Gauke, the liberal-minded former Tory justice secretary, to carry out a review of sentencing policy and his final report is out this morning. He has also published a report on history and trends in sentencing. Later Mahmood will give a statement to MPs where she will say which of the recommendations she is accepting. As Rajeev Syal reports in his overnight preview story, the answer is most of them. Government sources said [Mahmood] is expected to accept the review’s key measures including that well-behaved prisoners should be released on tag after serving a third of their sentences. She has also accepted that those who have committed serious sexual or violent crimes could be freed to serve their sentence in the community after they have served half of their sentence. One of Gauke’s suggestions – that the most dangerous offenders should be allowed to apply for parole earlier if they earn “credits” – has been dismissed by sources close to the justice secretary. And here is Rajeev’s summary of the main points from the report. Among the main recommendations, Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary, said the government should: -Ensure custodial sentences under 12 months are only used in exceptional circumstances. -Extend suspended sentences to up to three years and encourage greater use of deferred sentences for low-risk offenders. -Give courts greater flexibility to use fines and ancillary orders like travel, driving and football bans. -Allow probation officers to adjust the level of supervision based on risk and compliance with licence conditions. -Expand specialist domestic abuse courts to improve support for victims. -Expand tagging for all perpetrators of violence against women and girls. -Improve training for practitioners and the judiciary on violence against women and girls. -Change the statutory purposes of sentencing so judges and magistrates must consider protecting victims as much as they consider punishment and rehabilitation when passing sentences. Gauke has called for the need to increase funding and resources for the probation service, including expanding the availability of electronic monitoring equipment like tags, and warned that there will be a “public backlash” if money is not found. The Conservatives are opposed to the plans. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: By scrapping short prison sentences Starmer is effectively decriminalising crimes like burglary, theft and assault. This is a gift to criminals who will be free to offend with impunity. But Gauke has defended his plans, saying they are needed because otherwise the government will run out of space in prisons, and the criminal justice system will break down. He told the Today programme: Nobody, I think, wants to see a repeat of [the prisoner early release scheme – an alternative means of dealing with prison overcrowding] because that is rushed, it’s unplanned, it’s unstrategic, and so on, and it’s much better to face up to the realities, recognise where we are with the prison population and set out a plan that is strategic, that is properly prepared and gives due notice to everybody, so that we do not find ourselves in that situation. Because if you run out of prison places, then really you are putting the whole criminal justice system at risk. Gauke also said more community sentences could provide better value for money for the taxpayer. I think there is a point from the perspective of the taxpayer that can be missed here. Prisons are expensive. They cost £54,000-a-year for a prison place. That money can be spent very effectively in the community, both punishing offenders and helping with rehabilitation. Here is the agenda for the day. 9.30am: Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, takes questions in the Commons. 9.30am: The Office for National Statistics publishes immigration figures for the year ending December 2024. The Home Office is also publishing its own quarterly figures on asylum seekers, visas and resettlement. 10am: Kent county council meets for the first time since it came under Reform UK control. 10am: Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry as part of its test, trace and isolate module. 10.30am: Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, takes questions on future Commons business. 11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing. Around 11.30am: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is expected to make a Commons statement about the Gauke review of sentencing. Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions from MSPs. Here is the agenda for the day. 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Author: Andrew Sparrow