Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 80B, 89ZA and 89BA, all of which are grouped with Amendment 80A. We have reached Part 4 which covers sentencing. When we discussed the composition of the Sentencing Council in Committee, I was delighted that the Minister agreed with the proposal of my noble friend Lord Dholakia that the lay membership of the council should include someone with experience of the rehabilitation of offenders. It is that sort of expertise that is central to the issues that the council will have to consider, and that was a good decision. However, I was not so successful in persuading the Minister that someone with experience of the media and someone with experience of youth offending should also be included, despite support at the time from other, distinguished noble Lords. I draw some comfort from the fact that someone with expertise in the rehabilitation of offenders is very likely also to have experience of youth offending, and I hope that this will be seen as a requirement to be included in the skills of this particular member. The Government must be in no doubt of the extreme importance of expertise in the field of youth offending, where our record of reducing reoffending is so poor and the needs of this group so great. I am not going to pursue that argument any further, but I want to return to my other suggestion since I continue to believe that knowledge and experience of the media is extremely important, in an understanding both of communication skills and of how the media work. It is vital that the Sentencing Council is able to deploy such skills as it carries out its new duties, enabling it to ensure that some balance is restored to the way in which the press, particularly what are called the red tops, report on events in our criminal justice system. How to redress ignorance and misunderstandings on the part of the public is an issue that has to be taken very seriously, since the media represent the single biggest factor influencing public understanding of, and confidence in, our sentencers. This is not a trivial proposal, but a very serious one that also informs my next amendment. How things are reported is, quite understandably, a cause of real pressure and anxiety for many sentencers. There is considerable anecdotal evidence which shows that how they perceive the possible response of the local or national press can have a significant bearing on the final decision in a case. This influence is unacceptable when it occurs: how tough you are prepared to appear—or, more worryingly, how soft on crime and offenders—can be a real issue. Alternatively, if an accused is described as walking free from the dock because he has not been sent down to prison but given a community-based disposal instead, we are given a totally distorted impression of what took place and what the decision meant. It implies that because the defendant did not go to jail, he was not being punished and was effectively getting off. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, who designed our original Sentencing Guidelines Council and chaired it with the greatest distinction, recalled while we were discussing this in Committee the rough reception he was given by the press to the sensible guidelines he was announcing. They had involved much research and hard work on the part of the council, and that reporting did much damage. That, also, was quite unacceptable, but we all know how powerful and pervasive reporting of that kind can be. We have talked quite a lot on this part of the Bill about the importance of public confidence in our system of justice and the relative lack of it at the moment. Is it any wonder that this is the case, and in large part is due to this sort of press coverage and corresponding ignorance of the realities on the part of the average citizen? The freedom of the press is something we treasure in a free society, of course, but if the power of the press is not engaged with and the full truth is not told, it can be a different and potentially dangerous challenge to the very freedom it is afforded. I understand that in the past year a new programme of judges’ media training has been developed, with 12 judges on the first panel. This is an interesting and most encouraging development, and of course there is the media and press office as part of the Judicial Office, so moves are being made to engage better with the media. How much more important and relevant it is, therefore, that the Sentencing Council should itself have a source of expertise in its ranks to advise at that crucial level. I appreciate that if this suggestion is taken seriously, which I hope sincerely it will be, it would mean an additional member to the eight lay members of the council so far included in the Bill. This was also pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, in Committee. I propose, therefore, that the statistician be dropped from the list, as his skills are not crucial to the working of a council such as this, particularly as the list of members in the schedule already includes a member with experience of academia and research, who would inevitably have the statistical skills necessary for this task as an automatic part of his or her skills set. Over the past few weeks, I have discussed this proposal informally with a number of senior judges and Law Lords to test their opinion on the matter. All of them regarded it as one which should indeed be accepted as adding a necessary and important dimension to the Sentencing Council membership. It is also, of course, a view which is held elsewhere in the criminal justice world. I am sure that there is inevitability about this kind of skill being brought in and I sincerely hope that the Government share this view. The other amendments in the group relate to the issue of demand for prison places or resources for probation and youth services. I return to the amendments to which I spoke in Committee because the issues they raise, although apparently relatively minor, are potentially significant. Resources are, of course, fundamental to the effectiveness of sentencing. I have already welcomed the duty that the Bill now places on the council to carry out impact assessments of new legislation, which must in turn include consideration of the resources available. Despite official government policy that all but the most violent, prolific and dangerous offenders should not be in custody, one of the issues which is a constant worry to those of us involved in the management of offenders is that that policy has never been matched by proportionate, comparable investment in what is provided by way of alternatives to custody. This is particularly true of the Probation Service resourcing, as well as the range of organisations in the voluntary and private sectors which also carry much of the burden of this essential work. One of the factors affecting the public’s lack of confidence is when community disposals fail and offenders reoffend due to the lack of adequate, high-quality, available provision at the point of need. If a sentencer believes that a domestic violence programme or a drug treatment programme is appropriate and necessary in a particular case and then it emerges that it is not immediately available, what is the sentencer to do? Often recourse to custody may be the only, albeit less appropriate, option. The point then is that it is assumed that a prison place is always available. So far, no one has been known to be refused custody and sent back to court for the sentencer to think again. Even when the situation of overcrowding is dire, police cells will be used as an interim measure. The Government have been prepared to go to any lengths to provide for custody and now, despite the crippling economic state of the country, where stringent cuts are being required right across the piece, including NOMS and all criminal justice agencies, a further £1 billion has been made available in the coming year for the prison building programme. This is an extraordinary situation in the light of government policy. Thus, Clause 120 is important because the Sentencing Council is required to make an impact assessment on the effect that any changes in the sentencing practice of courts are likely to have on resources for prison places and the resources required for probation and youth service provision. If it is required to look at comparable resources for all provision, as we hope will now be the case, that will highlight both the enormous disparity in costs between custodial and non-custodial provision, where prison swallows up vastly more than community penalties. It will also draw attention to the comparative outcomes, where community programmes are significantly more effective in preventing reoffending. In other words, government policy, if resourced and implemented, would succeed in reducing reoffending, inspiring public confidence and making society a safer place. By requiring the Sentencing Council to look at what is available on the basis of equal and comparable criteria of resources, which should include costs, appropriate funding and outcome, the council will be able to make a far better assessment of the effects of sentencing practice. I beg to move.