" It seems to me generally desirable that the Board should identify in broad terms the matters judged by the Board as pointing towards and against a continuing risk of offending and the Board's reasons for striking the balance that it does. Needless to say, the letter should summarise the considerations which have in fact led to the final decision. It would be wrong to prescribe any standard form of Decision Letter and it would be wrong to require elaborate or impeccable standards of draftsmanship. "
"87. We summarise our conclusions as follows: "(i) There is no general legal rule that in making a risk assessment the Board must adopt a two-stage process of making findings of fact on the balance of probabilities and then treating only those matters on which it has made findings of fact as relevant to the assessment of risk. "(ii) The Board's task is to address whether the safety of members of the public requires that the prisoner should remain confined. In so doing, the Board must have regard to the consequences of its decision on the interests of the prisoner, and the hardship he may suffer if he no longer needs to be confined in order to protect the public. "(iii) There is no rule of substantive fairness, akin to a legitimate expectation, which requires the Board to have regard only to found facts in its assessment of risk. "(iv) What procedural fairness requires of the Board in its impartial performance of its statutory remit is determined by the statutory terms of that remit and the wider legal context of the common law. "(v) If weight is to be given to an allegation of criminal or other misbehaviour in the risk assessment, the Board should first attempt to investigate the facts to enable it to make findings on the truthfulness of the allegation. If, as may often be the case despite its efforts to obtain the needed information, the Board is not able to make such a finding, it should investigate the facts to make findings as to the surrounding circumstances of the allegation which may or may not point to behaviour by the prisoner which is relevant to the assessment of risk. "(vi) In some circumstances, however, the Board may not be able to make findings of fact as to the truth of an allegation either because of an inability to obtain sufficiently reliable evidence or because it would be unfair to expect the prisoner to give an answer to the allegation when he is facing criminal or prison disciplinary proceedings in relation to that allegation. "(vii) In such circumstances the Board, having regard to public safety, may take into account the allegation or allegations and give it or them such weight as it considers appropriate in a holistic assessment of all the information before it, where it is concerned that there is a serious possibility that those allegations may be true. But the Board must proceed with considerable caution in this exercise because of the consequences of its decision on the prisoner. Procedural fairness requires the Board to give the prisoner the opportunity to make submissions about how the Board ought to proceed. There may be circumstances where, because of the inadequacy of the information available to the Board, it concludes that it should not take account of an allegation at all. There may also be circumstances where the information is less than would be desired but the allegation causes sufficient concern as to risk that the Board treats it as relevant. Its assessment of the weight to be attached to an allegation is subject to the constraints of public law rationality. "(viii) Thus, a failure to make findings of fact where it was reasonably practicable to do so or an irrational reliance on insubstantial allegations could be a ground of a successful public law challenge."