Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I support the amendments moved so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, but I would like to go further than she has. If the Committee accepts her amendments, as I very much hope that we will, we might as well go a little further and get rid of Clause 128 altogether, because it serves no useful purpose. I start with subsection (1). Carrying an offensive weapon in public has been an offence under the Prevention of Crime Act since 1953—a long time ago. It carries a maximum sentence of four years. Incidentally, those were the days when the whole of one year's legislation could be included in a single volume of ordinary size, which one could read in bed, if one was so disposed. Compare that to what we have today: eight enormous volumes which one can hardly lift at all. That is by the way. In 2003, the Court of Appeal issued some guidance in which it said that if the offensive weapon is used to threaten someone, the sentence should be at the upper end of the scale, approaching four years. I ask a simple question. What can be the purpose of creating a new offence of threatening with an offensive weapon when it is already adequately covered by the Prevention of Crime Act 1953 with exactly the same maximum sentence? Surely a sound principle of legislation in the criminal field, as in other fields of life, known as Occam's razor, is that offences should not be multiplied without good reason. I can think of no good reason for enacting Clause 128(1). If the noble Lord can think of some good reason, I hope that he will let us know what it is. Exactly the same applies to subsection (2). Carrying a knife in a public place or on school premises has been an offence since the Criminal Justice Act 1988. It also carries a maximum sentence of four years. Again I ask: what can be the purpose of creating a new offence of threatening with a knife when it is already covered by the 1988 Act with exactly the same maximum sentence? It would surely be fanciful to suppose that by the addition of the words ““threatening”” or ““threatens”” in the description of the offence anybody is going to be deterred in real life. In real life, those who carry knives do not pay much attention to what we say here in Parliament. The courts already have ample powers under the existing law to deal with those who threaten with knives. Let us leave it to the judges, because nothing more is needed. There are other objections to Clause 128 on which the noble Baroness has touched. As with Clause 114, the sentence is mandatory—that is how it is described in the Explanatory Notes. To my mind, a mandatory sentence means one which the judge must pass, such as the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. However, this is not a mandatory sentence in that sense at all. The judge has discretion to do what is just in a particular case, as in all other cases. There is no ““must”” about it. So why use the word ““must””? Why call it a mandatory sentence when it is no such thing? Why, while I am about it, does the clause refer rather coyly to an ““appropriate custodial sentence”” when what it means is a minimum sentence? The only reason that I can think of is that ““must”” and ““mandatory”” are intended to give the impression that the Government are being tough on sentencing—it makes a better headline. I deplore this new-fangled style of introducing so-called mandatory sentences which are not mandatory sentences in the ordinary sense of the word. In a criminal statute, above all, words should mean what they say, neither more nor less. Finally, I of course accept that knife crime is a very serious problem, ending, as it does all too often, with a charge of murder. However, the way to solve the problem is not by creating more and more new offences. The way ahead is surely to follow the example of a remarkable woman, Karen McCluskey, a former nurse and qualified forensic psychiatrist. She saw that the only way to reduce knife crime among the young was to work with the gangs among which they lived, moved and had their being. With the help of the Glasgow police, she did just that. I shall not go into the details; they are all to be found in a copy of the Guardian of 20 December last year. It is enough to say that, as a result of her efforts, violent offending among the 500 gang members in eastern Glasgow fell by 46 per cent and knife crime by an astonishing 85 per cent. We should follow her example and not spend our time creating new offences which add nothing to the existing law. It is good that, as we have heard, the level of knife crime is falling. If we think that we are accelerating that process by enacting Clause 128, all I can say is that we are deceiving ourselves.