'My son was told he'd serve three-and-a-half years minimum - 14 years later and he's still locked up'

A mother has told how she is being "torn apart" by the sentencing scheme which has left her son locked up for 14 years.

When David Cummins appeared at Manchester Crown Court in 2008 he was jailed under an imprisonment for public protection sentence. (IPP). They were introduced in 2005 by the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to protect the public from dangerous and persistent offenders.

They were scrapped in 2012 on the back of a European Court ruling that they breached human rights - on the grounds that prisons had failed to provide inmates access to the rehabilitation courses required to demonstrate to the Parole Board that they were safe to be released. But the abolition wasn't retrospective, so today, even though more and more IPP prisoners are being released, there remain 2,926 still locked up on IPP sentences.