Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I want to touch on just two parts of the Bill which have not received a lot of attention so far, although the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, referred to Part 7 as sloppily drafted, which I shall come on to. First, however, I want to talk about Part 4. I am pleased to see the provisions for the role of sentencing guidelines. They are designed to streamline and strengthen greater consistency in sentencing across our courts. This has already been well developed over some years in order to get rid of random differences in sentences that bear no relation to local crime reoffending rates. I should say in response to the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, earlier, or to the noble Lord, Lord Henley, who is in his place, that at the same time the Bill maintains the discretion of judges to ensure the justice involved in deciding a particular sentence to fit the particular case and defendant. My right honourable friend Jack Straw said as recently as 24 March in the other place: ""We are not fettering the judiciary, but we are saying that there should be a carefully moderated body of guidance".—[Official Report, Commons, 24/3/09; col. 241.]" He went on to say that that guidance will become the framework that sentencing judges and magistrates will be expected to follow. I am sure that my noble friend on the Front Bench would agree that consistency in sentencing has been an objective pursued by the present Government practically since they came to office in 1997 with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, before which sentencing had been the exclusive preserve of the judiciary in the instant case. Over the past few years, the work of my noble friend Lord Carter of Coles and Lord Justice Gage, whose name was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, has been considerable in terms of the developments since 1998. The majority of Lord Justice Gage’s working party recommended that a court may pass a sentence outwith the guidelines only if it is in the interests of justice to do so. That formula is followed in the Bill. I personally commend it and I doubt if we would do better if we were to take the route suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, of seeking to amend that phrase. I come now to criminal memoirs, an entirely different subject, but as we all know, the Bill ranges over many disparate matters. On a number of occasions in recent years there has been public concern—it might be said public outrage—about the publication of memoirs from which convicted criminals have profited. Ian Brady, Mary Bell and Dennis Nilsen are among those who have profited from the publication of memoirs. A number of rules are already applicable. The Prison Rules prevent the publication of such memoirs while the author is in prison, and the Serious Organised Crime Agency is able to seek a confiscation order from the court when money has been obtained in connection with the offence. Many noble Lords may recall the two men who helped the spy George Blake to escape from prison in 1962. They were held by the High Court to repay the royalties they obtained from the publication of their book entitled How We Freed George Blake and Why. The Bill seeks to introduce a civil recovery scheme whereby the courts could order offenders to pay amounts in respect of benefits derived from the exploitation of any accounts of their crimes. Unlike Part 4 on the matter of sentencing, which I have praised, I rather doubt whether these provisions are really worth while or desirable. I should say to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, that that they are not just badly drafted, they are also not needed. The Bill’s own regulatory impact assessment states: ""At most it is projected that two cases a year will arise"." The Government claim that the changes are desirable to prevent further hurt and distress to victims and their families, and indeed concern for victims and their families is a theme that runs throughout the Bill, as the Minister has indicated. But that is a large claim to make for this part when the Government have to admit that the new measure will in practice "capture very few cases". I am talking about individual cases, but I would argue that the publication of a criminal’s memoirs may sometimes have beneficial outcomes in terms of assisting rehabilitation of the offender, just as learning new skills or discovering one’s artistic talent can help in rehabilitation. In any case, as has already been argued, the Prison Rules and the confiscation provisions of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 can be used to recover what I would call overly large royalties in the occasional case where that seems desirable. I also draw your Lordships’ attention to the fact that the Joint Committee on Human Rights is concerned that an exploitation proceeds order, which is the technical name for what the Government propose, is in part dependent on the degree to which people, victims and the general public are offended. In other words, the court would have to go into the question of to what extent it thinks that the memoirs will offend victims, the family or the public in general. Is it all worth while? As one sometimes does in Second Reading debates, I shall put a marker down at this point. If I get any support, I might seek to delete these provisions by saying that they should not stand part of the Bill.