Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I start by seeking to degroup Amendment 153 from the other two amendments in the group. Amendment 153 concerns the 41 prisoners who are currently serving whole life sentences in England and Wales. Before the Criminal Justice Act 2003, these prisoners would have had their sentences reviewed by the Home Secretary after 25 years. If they had made exceptional progress and there was no other reason for keeping them in prison, the Home Secretary would consider them for release on licence. There was never any question of automatic release. Each case was considered on its own merits. Some were released on licence; some were not. What I have just described was the settled practice of successive Home Secretaries for many years. It was a humane practice since it gave whole life prisoners the same hope of a review as other life prisoners. When the 2003 Act was going through Parliament this settled practice was somehow overlooked. There is no evidence that it was overlooked on purpose. It was not a deliberate omission. The purpose of this amendment is to restore the position to what it was before 2003, except that the review would be carried out not by the Home Secretary, but by the Parole Board. The reason for that is that the Home Secretary no longer has any function in relation to sentencing except the power to release a prisoner on compassionate grounds, a power which has never been exercised. I can see no good reason why the noble Lord should not accept this anodyne amendment. Anodyne it is. It cannot possibly do any harm. The only purpose of it is to give back to whole life prisoners the expectation of a review which they enjoyed before 2003. The only reason given by the noble Lord in Committee for not agreeing to the amendment was that it would never be accepted by the House of Commons, but the House of Commons has not yet considered the matter. Surely we are entitled from time to time to use some initiative to make some small improvement in the law and see whether we can persuade the other place to agree. There is one other point. On 17 January, the fourth section of the European Court of Human Rights gave judgment in a case called Vinter and Others v the United Kingdom. The question was whether the imposition of a whole life sentence was a breach of Article 3 of the convention. The court decided by the narrowest of majorities that it was not. In Committee the noble Lord naturally relied on that momentary triumph in support of his argument. I say momentary triumph because that decision is now subject to appeal to the full court. If the Government accept this amendment they will save the considerable cost of defending that appeal. For the issue in that appeal will then have become academic. If they do not accept this amendment and lose the appeal as they well may, they will be obliged to bring in primary legislation to give effect to that decision and thus bring us into line with every other European country except for some reason Holland. On any view it would surely make sense for the Government to accept the amendment now and to save the expense. I beg to move.