Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her amendments. I shall deal first with Amendments 80A and 80B before turning to Amendments 89ZA, 89BA and 89D. I hope the noble Baroness will bear with me on the first two amendments because later I hope to accept some of the points that she has made. The effect of Amendment 80A is twofold: it removes from the list of desirable skills of non-judicial members experience of statistics and replaces it with experience of the media. Amendment 80B adds the experience of non-judicial members in the rehabilitation of offenders. I part company with the noble Baroness and her suggestion that experience of statistics should be deleted. One of the key findings of the Gage report was the need for more sentencing data. The need for more data is crucial if the council is to fulfil all of its functions. More data are obviously needed to inform both new guidelines and the need to review current guidelines; more data are needed to work out what impact the guidelines will have on resources, which other amendments of the noble Baroness reflect; and more data are needed on sentencing trends and to make more accurate assessments of government policy. The need for further sentencing data was widely recognised in the responses to Gage. It was supported by all levels of the judiciary, by penal reform groups and, more recently, by the Justice Select Committee in its report Sentencing guidelines and Parliament. There is already in existence a range of sentencing statistics. The Ministry of Justice publishes national statistics on the number, type and length of sentences. The issue here is about new data. It means collecting data for the first time about the factors that exist in sentencing decisions, the factors that influence sentencing and the extent to which those factors change sentencing behaviour. The council will have to decide how to collect and analyse these new data that the judges will complete. This is obviously a specialist task. It is not one often found in combination with other experience relevant to the criminal justice system. That is why Schedule 14 includes a reference to a non-judicial member with experience of statistics. Amendment 80A would, alas, remove that skill, which we believe is specific to the success of the council in delivering its new functions, by replacing it with experience of the media. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear any government representative say that they do not underestimate the importance of good relations with the media. I recognise that it is important that the council communicates effectively, but I am not sure that it is essential to include specialist media skills as the kind of experience that the Justice Secretary considers for non-judicial members. As it happens, many of the non-judicial members will have media experience by virtue of their current positions; it is fair to argue that that is an everyday skill for the kind of high-calibre non-judicial members that the Lord Chancellor would seek to appoint. That experience of the members can be augmented by support staff with specialism in media relations, which is not unusual for a body such as the council. The reality is that the same breadth of experience simply does not exist for statistical expertise, which is why on balance we think that we should retain the skill in Schedule 1 and not replace it with experience of the media.