Coroners and Justice Bill

If I may respond, I know we have a secondary rewriting of this amendment, but I thought I might add something to this discussion. The Minister says that he is in favour of consistency, but in reading the amendment, he will understand what I mean when I say that it is a lawyers’ amendment and misses the point about the value and importance of a framework such as the council would be expected to lay down. We believe that consistency is important even within the parameters of judicial discretion. In 2006, a total of 70,000 prisoners were sentenced to immediate custody for 12 months or less. In magistrates’ courts, the average sentence length for immediate custody was 2.5 months in 2007. This current overuse of custody with short sentences itself represents an inconsistency of practice in relation to government policy; namely, that the use of custody should be a last resort only for the most dangerous, violent and prolific offenders. It is also at odds with practice across most of Europe. It is inconsistent with the aim of effectiveness and with the goal of preventing reoffending, since we also know that almost half of all offenders will reoffend. Short sentences, of all sentences, are recognised to be almost completely ineffective. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, when he was Lord Chief Justice, was particularly eloquent on the wastefulness, in every sense, of short sentences. The level of custodial use, by comparison with so many other countries, would indicate that, as a generality, we are getting it wrong—we are, indeed, being very inconsistent. These inconsistencies are then compounded by the range of custody rates for similar offences across England and Wales, as published by the Ministry of Justice in 2006. These range from 6 to 16 per cent in magistrates’ courts and from 45 to 68 per cent in the Crown Courts. The variations were not well explained by differences in the kinds of cases being sentenced. Sentencing differentials for children, in the data from the Youth Justice Board in 2007, also differed significantly between roughly comparable areas, reflecting differences in attitudes by sentencers. These ranged from Liverpool at the top end, with 11.8 per cent of all disposals being for custody, and Newcastle at the bottom, with 2.1 per cent of all disposals, with Birmingham being roughly in the middle with 8 per cent. Clearly, local conditions have a part to pay, but these are children’s lives that are at issue and these levels of inconsistency are hard to justify. We must not forget that these inconsistencies, coupled with the negative perceptions of disparities, have fed the damaging lack of public confidence we have been considering and argue for a greater alignment of guidance and practice.