Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, this amendment stands in my name and in the name of my noble friend Lady Linklater. It concerns the role of the sentencing council in relation to promoting awareness of matters relating to the sentencing of offenders by courts in England and Wales, in particular the sentences imposed, the cost of different sentences and their relative effectiveness in preventing reoffending, and the operation and effect of guidelines. This clause is of the greatest possible importance to that very important function of the sentencing council: communicating to the outside world what exactly it is doing, how and why. It is important not only because it involves disseminating fractured information—that matter is dealt with in subsection (1) and the council will be expected to publish such information—but because it is concerned also with "awareness", a word which implies a greater understanding of what the courts are doing. It is the very stuff of what we need to know and its proper communication—the very stuff which is missing at the moment. It is about how the public can come to understand what sentencing is about and what it achieves. Therefore, it is inevitably to do with engaging with the public if they are meaningfully to be made aware. It is all too easy to publish papers of facts and figures about its activities, but we all know what tends to happen to that sort of information: it remains on a shelf, unread by all but a few devotees, while the rest of us are none the wiser. The amendment would open the door to the possibility of closing the gap in public understanding and, even more importantly, addressing that lack of trust in the sentencing process. How can anyone have confidence in something that is not properly understood? In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, argued for the Government that, because awareness was a more abstract concept, it was, ""less appropriate to tie an independent body to such a statutory duty".—[Official Report, 15/7/09; col. 1248.]" That in a way is an extraordinary argument, for what is the point of publishing information or promoting awareness at all if it is not allied to understanding? The noble Lord was further worried that to explain to the public or make them aware of what the sentencing council does in relation to penal policy would mean straying into political territory. Again, I would suggest, that is an imaginary fear, given that it is generally agreed that to describe and explain the roles and duties of the council objectively, it is necessary for public understanding of and trust in our criminal justice system. Politics or preference, as the noble Lord suggested, does not come into it. Awareness-raising is a function performed by other guidelines councils, notably in Victoria in Australia, and of course what our magistrates do regularly all over the country when they run their local crime community sentence programmes, involving magistrates in the Probation Service, which my noble friend Lady Linklater described in Committee. There is also an exercise run by the judiciary, called "You Be The Judge", which is another way of communicating how the system works and sentences are arrived at. However, those exercises happen rarely because they are quite time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, sentencers are no strangers to creating awareness. However, it is important that it should be acknowledged as such and the sentencing council should have a duty to promote it. It is also worth considering how deterrence, one of the recognised objectives of sentencing, can possibly be meaningful or effective if no one knows what it is actually about. An offender cannot be deterred by something that he is not aware of. At present, the British public not only lacks trust in our system but, unsurprisingly, is very ignorant of the realities. Some recently published figures from the British Crime Survey show that 75 per cent of the British public think that British courts are too lenient. Yet when asked what percentage of men convicted of rape should go to prison, two-thirds of the public said that it should be less than 80 per cent, whereas in 2007 it was 97 per cent of that group. When asked about death caused by drunk driving, 41 per cent thought that the perpetrator should go to prison, when in fact 96 per cent of those found guilty of the offence were sent to prison. It is a commonplace experience for those of us involved in the criminal law to put to friends or guests the scenario of a recent case and ask them what sentence they would pass; inevitably, it is far more lenient than the actual sentence imposed by the judge. So the public have a distorted view of sentencing. Judges are in fact more punitive than the public imagine them to be and more punitive than the public themselves. Since it is widely accepted that there is little public confidence in sentencing, what body could be better placed to rectify the situation as the source of guidance than an independent body consisting of experts, whose experience as judges and other related fields are more likely to promote greater understanding and confidence than politicians would in a month of Sundays? To say, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, did in Committee, that it would be inappropriate and impossible to deliver is seriously to minimise the quality and distinction of the sentencing council membership and its abilities to describe its role in a professional, clear, unbiased and understandable way, thus generating greater awareness in the public at large. Your Lordships will recall that this afternoon my noble friend Lady Linklater suggested that the council should have on it someone with experience of the media to be able to advise the council how to promote greater understanding. It should be a duty, because it has such potential significance and should not be downplayed, in the context of the range of activities that the sentencing council will be expected to undertake. If we lose this opportunity now, the moment will pass and it will be a long time before we can look again at that confidence in and understanding of sentencing, which is born of awareness. That is the purpose behind this amendment. I beg to move.