Coroners and Justice Bill

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for tabling Amendment 187A and the other amendments in this group, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, said, permit us to have a discussion about what sort of sentencing council we should have and what its priorities should be. It is clear from clauses in the Bill that we shall come on to that the main function of the council will be to produce and police the application of sentencing guidelines. This group of amendments gives us the opportunity to consider, albeit briefly, a sentencing council with a slightly different emphasis—a council that has a remit to look at sentencing and the effects of sentencing; to study and report on sentencing generally; to look perhaps at matters such as why sentences in England and Wales are much longer than those passed in general in western Europe; to enter into a range of activities to enable the public to be better engaged in what sentences can achieve and the processes by which a sentence is arrived at by a sentencer; and to be a research, consultative, advisory and educational body, following the model of the body in the state of Victoria in Australia. An example of the sort of work such a body might do is the study commissioned by the Sentencing Advisory Panel called Public Attitudes to the Principles of Sentencing, published last month. The research examines public attitudes to a number of issues: the purposes of sentencing; the impact of common aggravating and mitigating factors relating to the offence and the offender; and whether the relative costs of custodial and non-custodial sentences should impact on the sentence chosen. The findings of that study are of some interest and relevance to this debate, and I shall refer to just some of them. In brief, the public see different objectives applying to serious crimes from those that should apply to less serious crimes, which is a common-sense, expected approach. The public are more concerned with the objectives of punishment and deterrence when considering the sentencing of serious crimes of violence. But support for rehabilitating offenders is high, even for those convicted of serious crimes of violence. I am sure that that will be welcomed. A big majority believed that use of a weapon increased the seriousness of an offence. Only a minority thought that theft from the state was more serious than theft from an individual. Where the victim was vulnerable the offence was seen as more serious. Particularly interesting is the finding that when the survey respondents were asked to consider examples of burglary, assault and fraud, and asked whether all, almost all, most, only some or no offenders convicted of these crimes should be imprisoned, the public did not see these offences as either always requiring custody or never requiring custody. It seems that the public are very flexible and are prepared to say that it all depends. However, the researchers conclude that people take the view that the decision to imprison should be affected by many aggravating and mitigating factors, not simply the nature of the offence. The research also found, as the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has already suggested, that people are misinformed about the extent to which the courts use custody, and their perspectives on sentencing are shaped by the mistaken belief that the courts are lenient. It concluded that any attempt to accommodate public opinion on sentencing principles will achieve little until these misperceptions about current practice are addressed. The research seems to suggest two things. First, there is a considerable job to be done in informing the public about the actual levels of sentencing. Secondly, the public appreciate that sentencing is complex, that many factors about the person and the situation should be taken into account, and therefore, that prescription and rigidity is not the pathway to justice. This is useful research and, as far as I know, it is the most detailed that we have on the subject. The document produced by the Sentencing Commission working group called, A Summary of Responses to the Consultation Paper suggests that there is considerable opposition among the judiciary and magistrates to the proposal to strengthen the force of the guidelines and much support for the view that they should be advisory at most. How far sentencing can be reduced to a formula and how far it is an exercise involving a complex weighing-up of many ethical considerations of culpability and the interests of the victims and the wider society can perhaps be seen in the case of Schumann. Angela Schumann was jailed for 18 months after jumping from the Humber Bridge with her young daughter in her arms in a suicide attempt, which they survived. She then pleaded guilty to attempted murder and, as I said, was jailed for 18 months. Allowing her appeal against the prison sentence, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, who was Lord Chief Justice at the time, said: ""We have asked ourselves, is it really necessary or was it really necessary to send this unhappy woman to prison to punish her for the momentary aberration which led her to try and take her own and her child's life? ... There is one word that you will not read in the sentencing guidelines and that is ‘mercy’... There are occasions where the court can put the guidelines and authorities on one side and apply mercy instead"." In so far as the amendments move away from the model of the sentencing council that the Government are proposing and suggest that we would benefit from something with much broader concerns, they are welcome. I can see great advantages in a body with a broader consultative and educational remit, and very few advantages, if any, in most of the proposals in subsequent clauses. I end by pointing out that when countries establish bodies such as the Sentencing Guidelines Council, their prison populations always rise. With our high use of prison already, it is worth thinking about whether that is the path to follow. It seems perhaps appropriate this evening to end by citing what Lord Kingsland said at Second Reading. He said: ""what worries me about all this is that judges are increasingly seen—if I may put it bluntly—as civil servants. They are not seen as independent under the throne, as they ought to be viewed constitutionally. The constraining of their discretion in the Bill is at least one and possibly two steps too far."—[Official Report, 18/5/09; col. 1213.]"