Coroners and Justice Bill

This is essentially a probing amendment related to something that has been raised in this House many times, including recently. It is now more than seven and a half years since the European Court of Human Rights found that the United Kingdom was in breach of the European convention in not allowing prisoners to vote. Those seven and a half years are in stark contrast to the speed with which, for instance, the Parliamentary Standards Bill has been rushed forward to this House and rushed through it. Eighteen of our fellow European countries allow all prisoners to vote and eight ban some from voting. The United Kingdom is one of only nine which automatically disenfranchise all sentenced prisoners, including Armenia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Romania. However, it is interesting that two countries with far worse human rights records than those—China and Iraq—both allow prisoners to vote. One thing that has held up the Government from taking the sensible line—this was also reinforced by the European court when the Government appealed against the original decision—is the idea of passing to the sentencers the responsibility of deciding who should or should not have the vote while in prison. My amendment, therefore, is designed to follow the current procedure in France and Germany, where the courts have the power to impose loss of voting rights as an additional punishment. The proposed sentencing council would be exactly the right organisation to decide what guidelines should be issued to sentencers to help them decide, on the basis of the evidence that they have heard, whether or not a particular crime committed by a particular individual should carry with it the additional sentence of removal of the right to vote. At present, we are in the middle of a second consultation on this issue which is purely around whether the length of sentence should be the determinate of whether or not people should have a vote. That is entirely illogical because, for example, currently a shoplifter who is sentenced to a community sentence is allowed to vote and a shoplifter who is sentenced to custody is not. The way out of this is to remove as many of the illogicalities as possible. Putting the onus on the sentencing council would remove the political concerns—many of which are determined by fear of the media—from something which the European courts have already determined we ought to do. The amendment is designed to suggest to the Government that they might like to consider this proposal as a sensible way out of a situation that has taken them so long to determine so that we can bring ourselves into line with the direction we have been given, possibly in time for the next general election. I beg to move.