Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, we agree almost entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said on this issue. Amendment 89A changes the requirement on the council to promote awareness of sentencing issues. It does this first by adding a new duty on the council to, ""inform, consult and engage with the public on penal issues"," and secondly by requiring that the council "must" promote sentencing rather than the current "may" do so. On the first point, the amendment would require the council to engage with the public on penal issues. That would be a completely new role for the council. Without better particulars, we wonder what that new duty entails because "penal issues" is a wide term. The ordinary meaning of the words would suggest anything relating to the punishment of offenders. Could it mean that the council must consult for example on the nature of prison regimes, the security of prisons or on the provision of education and healthcare? Those are all penal policy issues and all worthy and important, but they do not in themselves relate to sentencing and they should not in our view be within the remit of a sentencing council. It would be inadvisable to place a mandatory duty on the council to consult on something which is so potentially wide ranging. The second part of this amendment relates to the promotion of awareness of sentencing. It remains the Government’s view that an independent body such as the council should promote awareness, but we are also of the view that it would be ill-advised to place a statutory duty for such a task. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the noble Lord, as my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe managed to do, "promotion of awareness" is a much more abstract concept than the publication of statistics and is not one that fits with such an absolute duty. We think it advisable, given the nature of the task, to give the council some discretion about how it promotes awareness. However, I want to make it absolutely clear that by not supporting Amendment 89A in full we are not trying to discourage the council from promoting awareness of sentencing. I am happy to state on the record that the Government fully expect the council to undertake this task. We will encourage it to do so. We will expect it to report on how it has done so and we expect it to be scrutinised on how well it has performed. In the light of that, I hope that the noble Lord will consider withdrawing his amendment.