Andy Burnham has announced a new review into the IPR sentence as part of his plan to reduce the prison population. The move puts fresh pressure on a sentence that was abolished but still holds more than 2,000 people in England and Wales.
Tommy Nicol captured the cost of that system in January 2015, when he told his family he was suffering “psychological torture of a person who is doing 99 years”. He had already spent six years on an imprisonment for public protection sentence for stealing a car from a garage and injuring the owner, and he was two years beyond his four-year tariff when he spoke to them.
Tommy Nicol and the Parole Board
Nicol had just received another two-year knock-back from the Parole Board and was in despair. Eight months later he hanged himself at The Mount prison in Hertfordshire, England. His death sits at the point where law, parole and personal collapse meet: a sentence meant to be narrow in scope became a long-term form of detention for people who could not persuade the Parole Board for release.
David Blunkett later called the IPP sentence “the biggest regret” of his political career, and Alice Edwards agreed with Nicol’s description, calling it “psychological torture”. Those words matter because they frame the new review as more than an administrative exercise. Burnham is looking again at a sentence that the article says has already been abolished and repeatedly judged wrong, while thousands are still living under it.
England and Wales backlog
Between 2005 and 2013, 8,711 people were given an IPP sentence, although the sentence had been intended for only an estimated 900 people at any one time. Some prisoners were recalled for the slightest breaches of licence, including being late for appointments with probation officers, and that helped keep the prison population under pressure long after abolition.
The scale of the remaining backlog is still visible in the deaths that have followed. By March 2025, 94 people had taken their own lives while serving the sentence in prison, and 44 more are known to have taken their own lives while out on licence; the latter figures have only been tracked since April 2019.
Burnham’s review
Burnham’s review is now the political test. If it is serious, it has to confront how people already sentenced can still be left serving an order abolished in 2012 because the change did not apply retroactively. It also has to decide whether the answer is resentencing, earlier release rules, or another layer of review that leaves the same cohort waiting.
For people still on IPP sentences, the immediate fact is simple: the prison population plan has reopened a file that never really closed. Nicol’s case, the numbers in England and Wales, and Burnham’s new review all point to the same unresolved question — what concrete change, if any, will follow for the thousands still on it.
