Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My attitude to this clause is certainly not condemnatory. However, it is very cautionary. The main issue has already been put most articulately by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. But I bear very much in mind what he said rather cynically, and perhaps justifiably so—that this is not wholly unconnected with the fact that our prisons are bursting at the seams. That echoed the words of that most splendid gentleman, the late Lord Allen of Abbeydale, who told me more than once when I was a Minister in the Home Office some 40 years ago that in his experience—he had been in the Prison Commission and in the Home Office for 30 or 40 years—most of the splendid things that had been done by way of criminal law reform had been done for the wrong reasons. I suspect that we still operate under that reality and that very probably all governments, whatever their problems, face much the same situation. As I am in anecdotal mood, I recount what happened in 1968 in the Home Office when it was discovered, after the Criminal Justice Act 1967 which introduced suspended sentences had run for 12 months—I am not exactly sure of the figures but they must be very near exact—that the number of fines had fallen by some 18,000 in that 12 months. The number of suspended sentences was either 19,000 or 17,000—it was 1,000 one way or the other—and with the greatest possibility of coincidence in the world, there must have been some causal connection between those two factors. The point that I seek to make is this. You can never be sure how courts will react to these situations, especially when you bear in mind that the courts which will be dealing with these matters day in and day out will mostly be magistrates’ courts. Noble Lords will know far better than I how two magistrates’ courts with adjoining petty sessional divisions and very similar social backgrounds will adopt totally different sentencing policies. Therefore, there is a danger that you will not get what you expect to get and what you wish to get with this clause. Magistrates may well say, ““We would like to fine this person but he has no money””. For a number of reasons they may react against the alternative prospect of a community sentence and say, ““Very well, my lad, it’s got to be prison in your case””. So although you defend yourself against the danger that the subjects of suspended sentences may breach those sentences and end up in prison, other people will go to prison immediately. I believe that a suspended sentence for a comparatively minor offence can be very useful. When you look at the escalation over a person’s criminal career, you say to yourself, ““What if he had been stopped early on? What might have happened if he had been pulled up with a short suspended sentence for a summary offence?””. The consequences of losing that tool should be taken very much into consideration. My other point is the one made most elegantly by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. That is, it involves some logical gyroscopics to be able to bring about the situation. Before a sentencer determines that a matter is one for custodial sentence, he must determine whether the custodial threshold has been passed and custody is appropriate. Then he has to constitute himself into a parole board and say to himself that the man he decided, one second ago, to send to prison need not serve that sentence after all. Such mental athleticism and gymnastics are not what ordinary people would appreciate as being very sensible. It is done and I appreciate that, perhaps, in this case, the alternative to doing nothing to what is contained in Clause 10 might well be to issue very sound advice to magistrates’ courts. However, the logical track is still there. You are still inviting them to take that logical track on the basis of an administrative precept, rather than on the basis of legislation. While I have sympathy with the Government, appreciate their motives in this case and wish, indeed, that they would succeed in reducing the prison population, I am very unsure that that will, necessarily, be the case.