Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, in a letter to Lord Kingsland on 8 July gave some idea of the Government’s intention with this proposal. He said that, ""the intention of guidelines is to produce starting points from which sentencers can then consider the individual factors of the case rather than provide the appropriate final sentence after those factors are considered"." That has to be absolutely in the forefront of the Government’s intentions, whereby they are doing no more than providing a starting point. The noble Lord went on to say that, ""the clause has been re-drafted to make clear that the duty to follow guidelines does not mean a sentencer has to sentence within a narrow category; rather the sentencer is required only to sentence within the entire guidelines range for the offence—unless it is in the interests of justice to depart from the entire guideline"." Again, there is a clear statement from the Government that these guidelines do not operate as too narrow a constriction upon the judge. Inconsistency of sentences is always there, and you will never get rid of it. I remember that, in my youth, if I appeared in a magistrates’ court in the mining areas where I lived, the shooting of pheasants was not considered a serious matter. However, you had to go only 10 miles down the road to the rural district of Maelor where the local Lord—a Member of this House—was the chairman of the Bench and you would be lucky not to be taken outside and shot. We have moved on a little since those days. I remember the provisions for suspended sentences which were introduced by my late noble friend Lord Jenkins of Hillhead when he was Home Secretary in 1966. They were operated successfully until a particular Government—I will not say who—decided that they had gone too far and that suspending a prison sentence should not happen unless it was in the interests of justice. That had a chilling effect on sentencers at that time, and it became extremely unusual to achieve a sentence of imprisonment’s suspension. That operated until, I think, 2000, when suddenly it was decided that suspending sentences was rather a good thing and that it should be reintroduced and used more widely. That is the position now. However, when I was looking at this topic, I saw what the late Lord Jenkins had said, and it should be stuck up in the Home Office somewhere. He said: ""The main range of the penal provisions of the Bill"—" the 1966 Bill— ""revolves around the single theme, that of keeping out of prison those who need not be there. I approach this from two separate but convergent directions. First, the overstrain upon prison resources, both of buildings and men, is at present appalling. The prison officers are bearing a very heavy burden indeed. Without a comparable increase in buildings or staff, the prison population for all establishments has increased from 11,000 in 1938 to 29,000 in 1964 and to nearly 35,000 today"." We have much more than double that prison population today. What were the effects of that? Roy Jenkins continued: ""Such numbers, many of them in for very short periods, make it extremely difficult for the essential custodial and rehabilitative task for men serving sentences of more than a few months to be performed. They militate against effective security and also against the development of properly organised prison work, with something like a full working week, a direction in which I regard it as most important for us to move quickly.""Even if these considerations did not exist, even if—a most unlikely hypothesis—we had limitless resources of officers and buildings for use in the prison service, I would still take the view that a prison population as big as our present one defeats its own ends—and defeats it by frittering away the deterrent effect of a prison sentence.""I want to keep this deterrent effect a sharp instrument. But by using it too freely—by getting too many people used to prison too easily—we blunt our own armoury".—[Official Report, Commons, 12/12/66; cols. 64-65.]" That was a Labour Home Secretary in 1966 who was putting forward the philosophy which we on these Benches have followed at all times. I have confidence that the sentencing guidelines produced by the new council will have some effect of depoliticising imprisonment and punishment. That is what I hope will happen. The reason why we have ratcheted up the number of prison places from 35,000 in 1966 to 85,000 today relates to political pressures and listening to the media, as my noble friend Lady Linklater pointed out. There was a ratcheting up and things need to be calmed down. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—I can beat him, as I was the pupil of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, not his junior—in his chairmanship of the existing council did a great deal to get the political element out of sentencing. I hope that the new Sentencing Council will do the same. I also hope that, instead of prison sentences inexorably getting greater, they will come down. If they come down, I will be the first to say that judges should follow the guidelines. We should not expect the Sentencing Council to put up prison sentences. I hope that the council, which comprises practitioners and people from a number of callings, will steady the ship and calm the whole thing down. For those reasons and only for those reasons, as I have the greatest sympathy with the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, we feel that we can support the Government on this matter.