Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

This has been an interesting debate. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, that a number of clauses in the Bill will have, we hope, a positive impact on the prison population. There is no escaping that we have a very serious problem with the prison population. I hope that the provisions in this Bill will commend themselves as worthy in their own right, alongside contributing to an easing of prison population pressures. Generally, noble Lords are always urging me to do this, except when it comes to a particular amendment, when we sometimes take a different view. The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, certainly had wise words of advice for Ministers and those who seek to influence these matters. He reinforced the importance of sentencing guidelines when it comes to the advice available to magistrates in doing their very important work. I want to make it clear that in moving that this clause stands part of the Bill, it is not my intention to criticise the work of magistrates. They do an excellent job. It is more to help give them the appropriate guidance that is required. These orders were introduced in April 2005. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, they enabled a court passing a sentence of imprisonment of less than 12 months to suspend that custodial sentence for a period of between six months and two years. These have been used extensively. In recent months, more than 3,500 per month have been given out by the courts, of which 40 per cent are for summary-only offences. However, at the same time as the rapid increase in the use of suspended sentences, there has been no drop of equivalent magnitude in custodial sentences. The view of the Government is that many of those sentenced to a suspended sentence order would previously have been sentenced to a non-custodial disposal. The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, would say that that is a result of the Elystan-Morgan law of not getting what we expect. But, clearly, to merit a suspended sentence an offence should have reached the custody threshold. We think that as a result of the introduction of the suspended sentence order we have added about 400 places to the prison population, and that number will build up over about a two-year period from now. The reason for that is that those who breach suspended sentences are almost certain to go to prison, whereas breach of community orders has a wide range of consequences which do not necessarily end in custody. Therefore, we are concerned about the way in which the new suspended sentence has been used where we think a community disposal would previously have been deemed appropriate.