Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

As the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, said, custody is expensive and damaging, and in any case, it is largely ineffective. The JCHR wants statutory protection for government policy that custody should be the last resort. We have two amendments that seek to achieve that objective. I have a question for the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater of Butterstone. What if an offender commits a first offence that is so serious that the child represents a real threat to public safety? Both the amendments require a sentence that is below the custody threshold, but those circumstances must raise the question of whether one can generalise the situation to that degree. That is just a thought. We fully agree that a custody sentence should be the last resort; it should be used only when everything else has been tried. In that sense we are completely in tune with the animating spirit of the amendments. The JCHR report states that the Government are also in agreement with them. The difficulty with these amendments is the one that faced the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, in the amendment she moved almost at the beginning of today’s proceedings. How do we make such amendments have operational effect? When we get into the micromanagement of the criminal justice system, at every turn there are specific provisions in different forms of legislation, some of which stretch back years if not decades, which frustrate these objectives. Putting them on the statute book will not override the specific obligation. That is why we have taken a slightly different approach from that of my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, by tabling a series of amendments in the sentencing part of the Bill to give sufficient flexibility to the bench of magistrates or the circuit judge to prevent them having to ratchet up orders until a custodial sentence becomes obligatory for a minor offence.