Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Thank you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. During the early part of the speech preceding that by the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), I absented myself to go and have a sandwich, not having had any lunch, so I was not expecting you to call me quite as early in the debate. This is obviously an important debate. I shall not necessarily speak for the full time that is available to me, but I want to focus on the sentencing aspects, specifically of the Green Paper. I do so from my perspective as one of the two sitting recorders in the House; I am not sure whether the other intends to speak. It seems to me important that I do so in circumstances where sentencing has got itself into a bit of a mess in this country. At least in England and Wales, it has become exceptionally complicated for the judiciary, and for that reason the proposals that the Government are putting forward in the Bill are important, not only from the perspective of ““breaking the cycle,”” which was the concern of the consultation document, but from the perspective of the judiciary and the operation of the criminal courts in effectively sentencing criminals and meting out due punishment for the offences of which they have been convicted by a jury. The starting point with sentencing, of course, is the fact that in 2003 a Criminal Justice Bill was placed before the House and passed by the previous Government. It was amended on a number of occasions thereafter but was in fact a complete minefield. It was so complicated that in one case, the Court of Appeal commented that the relevant provisions were ““labyrinthine””; in another they were described as a ““legislative morass””. In a case called CPS v. South East Surrey Youth Court, the Court of Appeal said:"““So, yet again, the courts are faced with a sample of the deeply confusing provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and the satellite statutory instruments to which it is giving stuttering birth. The most inviting course for this Court to follow, would be for its members, having shaken their heads in despair, to hold up their hands and say: 'the Holy Grail of rational interpretation is impossible to find'.””" I have to tell the House that the position in which the courts have found themselves in relation to sentencing during the last decade has been utterly intolerable. Judges have had to spend considerably more time than they ought to when they should be trying cases on preparing sentences, giving reasons above and beyond those which they were previously obliged to give, and in fact giving reasons that are probably immaterial for either the victims of crime or, indeed, those who are on the receiving end of the sentence to hear. The simplification of that aspect of sentencing by the Bill, assuming that it becomes law, is therefore much to be welcomed. But I want it to go further, because the issue is important. I hope that the Lord Chancellor will listen to what I say in this regard and to what others, including the Sentencing Guidelines Council—and, I think, the Bar Council and the Law Society—have said. What we need, and what I hope we will see during this Parliament, is a consolidating statute that brings together sentencing for the entirety of the criminal law. Only then will the process become simpler and judges be able to give sentences that they are satisfied will not be taken to the Court of Appeal unless they have got things very wrong. Only then will people know precisely what sorts of sentences the courts are likely to hand down for the same sorts of offence. In due course, I imagine that that will ensure that considerable public support is given to the criminal justice system. I want to say a few words about legal aid. My hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) spoke for many of us in expressing concerns about the removal of legal aid in relation to some of the areas proposed by the Ministry. I hope that those will be explored in great detail in Committee, particularly given the Lord Chancellor's comments in his intervention on her. I want the Bill to come back with a report from the Committee that it is satisfied that the most vulnerable in our society will continue to have access to justice in precisely the same way as those who are able to buy justice. I say that from the perspective of one who, as a lawyer, considers access to justice extraordinarily important. Like my hon. Friend, I am concerned about those particular provisions and how they might discriminate against some of the most vulnerable. That said, I have no doubt that the Bill will be amended in Committee and that the Government will listen; I hope that they will. I am not sure that the Bill has absolutely everything right, but it is a step in the right direction, particularly in respect of the burgeoning legal aid budget under which we in this country pay eight times as much as the French taxpayer to give access to justice to those entitled to legal aid. It is not suggested that there is some desert in France where nobody has access to justice, so it must be possible to reduce the costs of legal aid. Indeed, the shadow Lord Chancellor said that last year when he accepted that if Labour was in power, it, too, would have to make cuts to the legal aid budget. It is a matter of regret and shame that rather than coming to the House to say where he would be making those cuts, he made a series of—[Hon. Members: ““No, he didn't; he spelled it out.””] It is extraordinary to hear at least one Opposition Member saying that the shadow Lord Chancellor spelled it out. I listened to the entirety of his speech, and I did not hear anything spelled out at all. [Interruption.] The shadow Minister is on the Opposition Front Bench. Perhaps he will tell us now where Labour would make the cuts in the legal aid budget.