What about the children? Implications of the new Sentencing Bill

Posted by NAYJ on Sep 15, 2025

Dr. Laura Janes KC (Hon)

The new law will release adults from prison at an earlier point in their sentence, unless they behave badly and accrue additional days.  It will also provide that when recalled to prison on licence, they will only spend a fixed period of 56 days in prison, unless exemptions apply. But children, and those who receive children’s sentences but turn 18 years of age during the sentence, are expressly excluded from these new laws and may spend more time in detention than adults.

How the new law will work for adults

Under the Bill, adults on standard fixed-term sentences will be automatically released after serving one-third of their sentence instead of at 40%, and those who are now released at the two-thirds point will be released at the half-way point.   The exception to this is if they break prison rules and receive additional days from an Independent Adjudicator (a visiting district judge from the  magistrates’ court).  The number of extra days that can be imposed in one go will double from 42 to 84.  These changes will not apply to adults serving sentences for public protection or indeterminate sentences – who will still have to go through the Parole Board to be released before any sentence end date.

Once out on licence, it is envisaged that adults will be subject to “intensive” supervision, with stricter licence conditions, usually on electronic curfew, until the final portion of their licence period when they will be under less intensive supervision, but still “at risk” of recall if they commit a further crime.  Under the new law, they can still be recalled, but only for a fixed period of 56 days, unless certain exemptions apply: these include being charged with a further offence or being subject to higher level Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (level 2 or more).  This represents a big change, as presently, the Secretary of State for Justice can decide whether a person is recalled for a fixed period of just 28 days or should be referred to the Parole Board for a review and only released before their sentence end date if they are considered safe enough.  These cases are around half of all Parole Board work.

But children will be treated differently

Children are expressly excluded from these changes. That means they cannot benefit from them.  Worse still, some children will find that when the Bill becomes law, they will be released later than they would be now.  For example, the “SDS40” scheme applied to children on long-term sentences (s250 of the Sentencing Act 2020) which means that a child serving a sentence of under 7 years would be released at 40% mark (subject to certain exemptions) but when the new Bill becomes law, will be released at the later stage of 50%.  Imagine having to tell a child that changes to the law to reduce pressure on the adult prison estate means they will now be released significantly later than they were previously told.

Children, and those sentenced as children, will be routinely disadvantaged compared with adults.  A child on a 7-year or longer sentence for a violent or sexual offence will have to serve two-thirds of their time — while an adult on the same sentence will be released automatically at the halfway point unless they accrue additional days.

So two people, sentenced for the same offence, serving time in the same prison, may have completely different release points — simply because one was a child under 18 at the time of sentencing.

Children are to be excluded from the new 56-day recall system (which allows adults to be returned to prison for a short time). Instead, they remain on the current recall regime.

What happens when a child turns 18?

The new Bill expressly provides that, if someone is sentenced as a child, the release regime at the point of sentence will continue to apply even after they turn 18. That means young people transferred to adult prisons will still be stuck on the harsher youth release rules, surrounded by adults who have more generous early release provisions.

Other disadvantages for children

The Bill also extends “sentences for offenders of particular concern” (SOPC) to children, which makes release subject to Parole Board scrutiny before the automatic release date.

Why does this matter?

Sentencing for children is a completely different exercise from adult sentencing: but it should be in a positive way and in order to take account of the welfare principle and the requirement that children should be in prison for the shortest appropriate period of time. Therefore, subjecting children to lengthier periods in custody than adult through changing the administrative release provisions completely undermines the impact of these principles.

The Explanatory Notes to the Bill make it clear that children *may* be subject to completely separate consideration (paragraphs 92-93):

“Youth sentencing has an entirely different framework and must have the primary purpose of preventing future offending and must consider the welfare of the child.

Youth sentences were not considered by the Independent Review of Sentencing and so the recommended changes to release dates were designed for the adult system. Instead, the department will consider what changes may be relevant and appropriate for the youth sentencing framework separately.”

But there is no plan in place as yet to indicate what this might look like.  Unless separate reforms are introduced for children quickly and so they can be introduced in parallel to the current Bill, there is a real risk that children will be placed at a real disadvantage.