Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, we all agree that this is a wide-ranging Bill. At this stage, I will avoid the temptation to speak on various aspects of the proposed legislation. Many noble Lords have concentrated on specific provisions and I shall follow the same practice. I will concentrate my remarks on Part 4, particularly Clauses 104 to 122, which establish a new Sentencing Council for England and Wales. This provision should help to build on the work of the current Sentencing Guidelines Council in achieving greater consistency in sentencing. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, with great care, but I will put a different point of view on this subject. Consistency of approach in sentencing is important in order that justice should be done and seen to be done. If two offenders who have committed a similar offence and have similar culpability appear before two different courts and receive a significantly different sentence, this disparity undermines public confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice process. It also discredits the judicial process. It is particularly important that minority-ethnic communities should have confidence that there are no racial disparities in sentencing, and that offenders from different ethnic groups receive sentences which are consistent and governed by guidelines which minimise the scope for unconscious racial bias. I ask the Minister to ensure a proper system of monitoring to ensure that unconscious racial bias has no place in sentencing decisions. As the Minister has said, the government reforms are based on the findings of an expert working group chaired by Lord Justice Gage. The working group sensibly ruled out excessively rigid options, such as in some American systems, in which guidelines consist of numerical grids from which courts must take their sentences. The Gage working group rightly considered that these systems do not allow sentencers enough scope to depart from the guidelines—for example, to reflect on matters of personal mitigation. Instead, it recommended a system which is similar in many ways to the current Sentencing Guidelines Council, with four main differences, which I will spell out. The first difference is that there will only be one body—the new Sentencing Council—instead of two as now, the Sentencing Advisory Panel and the Sentencing Guidelines Council. This is a sensible move. At present, outside experts and organisations are consulted three times over the same set of guidelines, first by the Sentencing Advisory Panel, secondly by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, and thirdly by the Justice Select Committee in another place, which also scrutinises the draft legislation. Combining two bodies into one should help streamline the process and enable guidelines to be produced in a shorter timeframe. Secondly, when it produces guidelines, the Sentencing Council will also produce a resource assessment of their likely impact on prison places and the resources of the probation service. This again I welcome. There is little sense in devising guidelines which could have a significant impact on the need for prison places or probation resources without any assessment of this impact. I cannot think of any other body issuing guidelines which would be allowed to do so. The Bill does not say that the guidelines have to fit within the currently available number of prison places; it simply says that the council must publish an assessment of the demand for prison places which the guidelines will produce. This will enable the Government to plan and allocate resources accordingly and will enable expert bodies commenting on the draft guidelines to do so in the knowledge of the resource implications. I hope that this significant move will assist in relieving the pressure on the Prison Service. More importantly, some of us who took part in the Question for Short Debate of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, last Thursday expressed serious concern about the probation service, and I trust that there are indicators established to work out the resource implications on this service. Thirdly, the Sentencing Council will be required to monitor the impact of its guidelines on sentencing practice and publish information on the sentencing patterns of different courts. This proposal is also welcome. Indeed, it is elementary common sense that any organisation or body issuing guidelines should monitor their subsequent impact. It will help the Sentencing Council in framing future guidelines to know whether its past guidance has had the results it intended, or whether there have instead been unforeseen or unintended consequences. Publishing information on the sentencing patterns of different courts will help to demonstrate how far the council’s guidance is achieving the aim of consistency of approach. Fourthly, there will be a different statutory test governing cases in which courts depart from the guidelines. At present, courts have to consider sentencing guidelines and give reasons if they depart from them. Clause 111 requires courts to follow the guidelines, ""unless the court is satisfied that it would be contrary to the interests of justice to do so"." Some critics of the Bill have suggested that this is too restrictive a test, but in my view it is entirely proper that a court departing from the guidelines should have to show that this is in the interests of justice. What other good reason could there be for passing a sentence different from the guidelines than that this is necessary in the interests of justice? I therefore welcome the provisions for the new Sentencing Council. However, there is one strange omission in the types of experience which will be sought when recruiting members to the council. It will have eight judicial members and six lay members. Schedule 13 sets out a number of areas in which the lay members will have experience. These are criminal defence, criminal prosecution, policing, sentencing policy and the administration of justice, the promotion of the welfare of victims of crime, academic study or research relating to criminal law or criminology, and the use of statistics. This is a logical list of areas in which lay members of the Sentencing Council might be expected to have expertise. However, the schedule does not include any mention of experience in the rehabilitation of offenders. This seems a strange omission, in view of the requirement in Clause 106 that the Sentencing Council should have regard, among other things, to the effectiveness of different sentences in preventing reoffending. It would surely, therefore, be helpful for the council to have input from a member or members with practical experience of preventing reoffending by rehabilitating offenders. I give notice that I will move an amendment to Schedule 13 to rectify this omission, unless of course the Minister takes steps to rectify this in or before Committee. With this caveat, I welcome the proposals for a Sentencing Council as a logical development of the current Sentencing Guidelines Council’s excellent work to promote greater consistency in sentencing. We shall of course monitor the outcomes in due course. They will determine if our confidence in these clauses is justified.