My Lords, I do not want to take much time. I understand, and indeed sympathise with, the thrust of the remarks of my noble friend and the intention behind his amendment. I am sure it is a good idea for people to know about the unduly lenient sentence scheme, particularly if they are victims. In my experience as a law officer who had to deal with these when I was in office, there did not seem to be any lack of knowledge among the people affected by what they thought were unduly lenient sentences, and we had plenty of applications to us in the law officers’ department to consider them. I say in brackets that, as often as not, not every crime or offence qualifies to come within the scheme. A degree of education needs to be made available in order that the public should realise that not every offence that they read about in the newspapers comes within the unduly lenient sentence scheme.
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The other point that needs to be got across to people is that “unduly lenient” does not mean that the victim, the member of the public, or the reader of the newspaper who reads a report of the conviction and sentencing of a defendant, would have sentenced the person to a higher sentence. There has to be, essentially, a gross error, where the judge takes the sentence outside the sentencing guidelines unreasonably or without providing a reason—sometimes there is a good reason for taking a case outside the sentencing guidelines. I would not want my noble friend to think that, by making sure that there is greater publicity about the
unduly lenient sentence scheme, it will necessarily solve the problem of people thinking that sentences for this particular offence are not high enough.