Coroners and Justice Bill

I shall address my remarks to amendment 161. They follow on to some extent from some of the remarks made by the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier). He said that the measure includes the requirement that the guidance of the Sentencing Council be followed. On amendment 44, he talked about not wishing to allow resources to determine the sentence, but resources are key to what is happening. Amendment 161 would amend clause 110. That clause requires the Sentencing Council to publish resource assessments in respect of its guidelines. In those resource assessments, the council will be expected to say what it thinks the guidelines will do in respect of the demand for prison places, the resources that are required for probation provision and for the provision of youth justice services. The question is: once the Sentencing Council has produced those reports about resource assessments, what happens to them? There is nothing whatever in the Bill to indicate that the Government will have to pay any particular attention to them, yet they are key if the recommendations of the Sentencing Council on sentences are to be put into effect. Amendment 161 therefore says that the Secretary of State must monitor those resource assessments and, as far as he practically can, ensure that there are adequate resources to ensure that the guidelines produced by the Sentencing Council can be put into practice. The concept of the Sentencing Council has been widely welcomed. I do not have any difficulties with it. Many people outside this place have welcomed it, but what will happen if the recommendations from the Sentencing Council go in a particular direction that the council itself says will impact on prison places and probation services? As the Minister knows, some of us have already told him we have concerns about the resources that are available now and will be available in the next two or three years to, for example, the probation service. Probation representatives are telling us that they are concerned about the effects of their current budgets on front-line services. I give just one example. The special domestic violence courts were introduced in 2005-06. A domestic violence programme is focused on changing attitudes and the behaviour of participants in that programme. It teaches people non-controlling behaviour. Courses run for a few months and involve individual sessions, group sessions and relapse-prevention meetings. They seem to be the sort of courses that we want to support, but we hear that there are considerable waiting lists for people to get on them: the waiting times vary from 13 to 42 weeks, depending on the area. The maximum wait for getting on a course varies from 33 to 208 weeks. If we are saying that we expect a course to be effective, but there is a waiting time of four years for someone to get on it, that hardly suggests that we are matching the resources to the programme we believe would be effective. Those are the issues that need to be considered in bringing the new regime into effect. I am not suggesting for one moment that it will be a simplistic exercise; it obviously is not going to be easy always to do this, but if we do not look at what the Sentencing Council has to say about the resource requirements, and we do not consider what can be done to provide those resources, we will end up with more examples like the one I have just cited. There will be recommendations to the courts about what they should do in respect of sentencing, and the court will follow those recommendations, but then we will find gaps in, say, the probation provision to make those sentences work. I hope that when he replies to the debate the Minister will address that point and look at what might be done to make that link between the recommendations and the resources that are needed to put them into effect.