David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, has said devising legislation that has left people languishing in prison for minor offences is the biggest regret of his eight years at the heart of government. The Labour peer, a titan of the Brown-Blair era, said imprisonment for public protection (IPP), known as the 99-year sentence, was the greatest blot in his copybook. IPPs, created in 2003 under Tony Blair’s premiership, granted indeterminate sentences and suggested a minimum time a prisoner should serve. Offenders can be on licence for up to 99 years upon release, meaning they can be recalled at any time, often for behaviour that is not criminal. In 2012, the European convention on human rights declared the use of IPPs “arbitrary and therefore unlawful” and the sentence was abolished, but not retrospectively for prisoners still serving their sentence. Nearly 3,000 prisoners in England and Wales are still serving IPP sentences. It is believed that 90 IPP prisoners have taken their own life when serving their sentence or on licence. “What has happened with this …