Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I think I heard the Minister give such an assurance, so I invite him not to press motions 2 and 3 tonight and to return to the House tomorrow with motions that are in order and make clear the Government's intention. However, that is enough about process. Let us deal with the substance of the Bill. Part 2 deals with sentencing. We heard an interesting exposition from the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs of what he understands by the term ““honesty in sentencing””. I agree that it is an essential missing ingredient of the Bill. The Liberal Democrats have argued for a long time that when a sentence is handed down in court it should say what is going to happen, for the benefit of victims, witnesses, the public and, indeed, defendants. That means that we need a change in the way that sentences are described in court so that there is a statement of the term that is to be served and the additional term that will be served if the prisoner does not accept the disciplines of the penal system. That seems an entirely appropriate way of dealing with matters. Our judicial and criminal justice systems are put constantly into disrepute by people realising that a sentence of a particular length of time means a much shorter time in practice. We argued against automatic release schemes, as did the Conservatives, and our suggestion would not require more or fewer people to be in prison, but simply clarity in the courts, which is in the interests of the criminal justice system. We certainly intend to table amendments in Committee to make that a reality and I hope that we shall have the support of the Committee in doing so. Secondly, I welcome the provision for judicial discretion in the discount procedure, if we have to accept the present system. The Lord Chancellor was careful in the words he used to support the judicial decision in the Sweeney case. I wish that the right hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (John Reid) had been equally discreet when the sentence was given. When Home Secretaries vilify the bench because of a system introduced by the Government, it does nothing to further the interests either of justice or judicial independence. I hope that future occupants of the position of Home Secretary will understand that point and perhaps be guided by the Lord Chancellor in so doing. Thirdly, we must recognise the crisis in our prisons—again, something that was alluded to by the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs. We have an ongoing disaster in our prisons, but I do not accept the simplistic thesis that we can deal with it simply by building more and more prisons and putting the same categories of prisoner into them. That does not work. We need to ensure that those who should not be in our prison system are taken out, to leave room for the proper rehabilitation of prisoners who must be in prison for the protection of the public, quite rightly. That involves moving those with mental illness into secure mental institutions, taking those with drug and alcohol problems into places where they will have treatment and taking out those who are serving very short custodial sentences, which do not work. Sentences of three months or less have an almost 100 per cent. recidivism rate. Therefore, what on earth is the point of using valuable prison space to impose a sentence that will have nil effect on the offender reoffending? There are better and tougher ways to deal with those offenders in the community. I should like to deal next with perhaps a rather crucial issue. Some right hon. and hon. Members may have read the story in The Times of 28 September 2007, saying that the brand-new National Offender Management Service, on which the Government have invested so much money and attention, is to be scrapped. I have heard no official rebuttal of that most extraordinary story.