Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, in replying to the debate on the last group of amendments, the Minister spoke of his residual affection for the Labour Party in terms that he might have used about an elderly relative. I half expected him to cross the Floor and offer me a cup of tea and a biscuit. I appreciate his kind thoughts. On the substance of what we are now discussing, I am not at all comfortable with the line the Government are adopting. I entirely support the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. Either the Government intend there to be an effective mandatory life sentence policy, which would be wrong in principle; or they want to give the impression of so doing when they do not intend that, which would be disreputable. I am sorry that the noble Lord appears to be lending himself to either of those approaches. The Minister referred to the party to which I belong as being less than liberal. Those who know me within the party I represent, here and elsewhere, know that I have not been uncritical from time to time of the penal policy of the previous Administration, for what that is worth. I was going to say that the noble Lord should perhaps look behind him, but there is only one Peer from the Conservative Party in the Chamber and she has the respect of us all. I recall a poster in the 2005 election—I cannot resist reminding noble Lords about this—which I noticed en route from Heathrow Airport into London, which said: "““What would you think if a bloke out on licence raped your daughter?””." That was the style of an election campaign of the noble Lord’s current partners. I do not for a moment imagine that he or his colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, then or now, would approve of that approach. One can debate the merits or otherwise of various party policies but that does not get us very far. However, the Minister talked about disarming a time bomb. The fear is that while he is disarming a time bomb he might be planting a minefield in terms of the effect of this provision about life sentences if it is carried out. Here I must plead guilty, before being charged, to inadvertently misleading the House when I gave statistics earlier, which I said related to the extended sentences. In fact, they related to the mandatory sentence provision. But they are the statistics and they demonstrate that over a decade around 5,500 would be added to the very long-term sentences if this provision should pass into law. A great proportion of them would involve serious crimes of violence against a person, as well as other offences. That was the substance of the Written Answer to the parliamentary Question to which I referred. The noble and learned Lord has more than adequately, as one might expect, disposed of the case, such as it is, for Clause 114. I hope that the Minister today will agree that it should cease to form part of the Bill or at the very least undertake to look again at the provision and come back at Third Reading on the issue.