My Lords, I had proposed to speak specifically to my noble and learned friend Lord Hope’s amendments, which are in another group but, frankly, these amendments are all mixed up together and I am rather surprised that they are not grouped. I agree with everything that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said. What it surely comes to, first, is that it is a good idea to look at the astonishing way the law has developed over recent decades.
When I went to the Bar 60 years ago, basically there was dangerous driving and careless driving, as there has been ever since. As now, there were well-recognised meanings and levels within the process of administering this law, and the courts—the magistrates’ courts particularly—and the practitioners know about that. There was also the very rare and very grave offence of motor manslaughter—manslaughter in the context of motoring. That applies to gross negligence cases and is a common-law offence. There is no maximum sentence but life is available. Then, gradually, over the years, sentences became more draconian. A two-year prison sentence was made available for death by dangerous driving. Then, in 1988, 14 years—seven times the original sentence—became the stipulated maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving. Now, of course, it is proposed to go from 14 years to life. Is it really contemplated that, short of some quite extravagant case of manslaughter, anybody really ought properly to go to prison for more than 14 years?
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Then there followed in 2012, by the LASPO Act amending the 1988 Act, two additional offences. For causing serious injury by dangerous driving, a five-year maximum was introduced, and for causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving, again a five-year penalty. But it is now proposed to increase that in turn, so that henceforth mere careless and non-deliberate driving, of which, surely, hardly a Member of this House cannot have been guilty at some point, combined with the misfortune—misfortune principally to the victim who is hurt, but it is also an unlucky day, is it not, for the driver who on that day hurts somebody?—should be liable to a prison sentence.
By all means, I encourage those such as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who put the emphasis on increasing periods of disqualification. It is a privilege to drive and, to that extent, inevitably to put the public to some degree of risk for the reasons I have just given. You can forfeit that much more readily than you should be sent to prison. Likewise, with fines: again, by all means fine people a very great deal, but putting aside the deliberate offences—uninsured driving, driving when disqualified, driving under the influence of drink or drugs and all those sorts of offences—we should not, I respectfully suggest, penalise somebody who has neither driven dangerously nor killed somebody by sending them to prison.
It is one thing to criminalise death by carelessness; the law has always paid especial heed to acts that result in death. For example, if you attack somebody who dies, you are still committing murder, even though you intended only some substantially lesser injury. Let us pause just for a moment and see what is really serious bodily harm in this context. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, referred to the Wilkinson textbook, the acknowledged textbook in this area. The injury, to be a really serious bodily injury, does not have to be permanent, does not have to be dangerous and does not have to require treatment. It takes account, for example, of such things as psychiatric damage to a vulnerable person. Therefore, it is one thing in the context of murder, but surely not in this proposed new category of offenders. It is a step too far.
I end by recalling that the late Duke of Edinburgh, a few years before he died, was driving, I think, a Land Rover out of Sandringham on to a public highway, there colliding with another vehicle, driven by a woman who—I am pretty sure I recollect correctly—broke her wrist. He wrote her, of course, a letter of apology and so forth. Should the Duke on that account—undoubtedly careless driving and undoubtedly a serious injury within the meaning of this legislation—have been liable to a prison sentence? I respectfully say no.