I find the wording of the Bill quite curious. I will limit my remarks to issues relating to suspended sentences under 12 months. The sentencing code is amended to add:
“The court must make a suspended sentence order in relation to the sentence where this section applies unless the court is of the opinion that there are exceptional circumstances”.
As a lawyer, I know that if we had 10,000 lawyers here, they would give us 10,000 different definitions of what “exceptional circumstances” means. But the court can take into account those that
“relate to the offence (or the combination of the offence and one or more offences associated with it) or the offender”—
so, if a court finds a fact about the offender or the offence that falls within the general definition of exceptional circumstances, it can impose an immediate custodial sentence—and
“justify not making the order.”
I hate to break it to colleagues, but that is actually what happens in the courts now; there is very little difference. This is an attempt, rightly or wrongly, to encourage some magistrates in some parts of the country to impose fewer immediate custodial terms.
The Bill will not stop custodial sentences being imposed for offences under 12 months. As I said in my intervention on the Lord Chancellor, it would be utterly bizarre if that were the case. Over 17 years, I represented thousands of people in the criminal courts and the vast majority of cases were drug and shoplifting related. I represented people with 400 or 500 convictions—the full gamut of offending—who never complied with an order in their life and literally had hundreds of failure to comply with court orders. What magistrate in the world is going to think, “I know what we’ll do, we’ll impose a suspended sentence”? If a characteristic of the offender is that they do not carry out the order imposed on them, the magistrate is not going to impose it in the first place.
If there is something particularly abhorrent about an offence—this is why I have some sympathy with what those on the Opposition Front Bench were saying—there will be an immediate custodial term. What I do not like is the debate that we should treat some crimes differently from others. Yes, there is a full range of seriousness in terms of offending, but if we are getting to the point where we are saying that for some you can get an immediate custodial term and for others you cannot, then I think that is nonsense. We have to be realistic.
When we are dealing with people in the criminal justice system, we are dealing with broken, fallible individuals. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) said, we are dealing with people and their lives and motivations, and all the other things that go into making them, at a certain time and point, commit a criminal offence. In this Chamber, we never, ever discuss what, in my opinion, could deter crime: work when children are growing up, a stable upbringing, and a set of values that they can carry with them through their lives, whether through education or parents, of whatever type. That is what matters.
Having a debate and judging whether we as a Parliament are successful on criminal justice by how long we send people to prison is utterly preposterous. What is the point in that? It is like we discuss money in this place: “We’ll send you to prison for 15 years.” “No, let’s go to 16 or 17 years.” That is not the point. The point is to allow our independent judiciary, within the sentencing framework we set down—bearing in mind that none of us will be in that court, none of us will know what motivated the person and none of us will know the circumstances—to make the decision that they want to make.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) made some very telling points. We cannot run away from the fact that this legislation is about prison numbers. However, it is fair to say—I repeat something that has been said—short-term custodial sentences are decreasing. One thing I am proud of is that under this Government longer-term sentences of 10-plus years for the most serious offences are increasing. We are having an impact on the most serious offending.