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Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough): My right hon. and learned Friend mentioned the Narey report. Will he comment, as a distinguished former Attorney-General,on the Bar Council, which is worried about a recommendation, flowing from the Narey report on clause 50 of the Bill, that non-legal staff will be able to institute proceedings and prosecute such matters as contested bail applications in court? Is that not a dangerous precedent? As Lord Mishcon said, should not a professional, independent mind be exercised on these important issues in the Crown Prosecution Service?
Sir Nicholas Lyell: My hon. Friend raises an important point, and I shall deal with it in a moment.
I shall focus my attention on delay. I asked the Attorney-General where we were to find the Government's proposals for speeding up criminal justice and thereby fulfilling their election promise to halve the time it takes for persistent young offenders to be brought before the court. He told me that I should burn the midnight oil and read the Bill. I have.
As I mentioned briefly when the Home Secretary kindly took my intervention, the Government should be careful not to be deluded by their own hype. They propose a pretty restrictive technical definition of a persistent offender--someone who has appeared three times before the court. Then, having noted that it took 142 days for someone to appear before the court, they propose to take some administrative step to ensure that it takes only 71 days. That is unlikely to solve the problem. I say this in anticipation of future, rather more party political, occasions. If the Government trot that forward as success, without tackling the real problem, it will be an empty gesture.
The real problem is that a substantial proportion of crime is committed by quite a small percentage of offenders, who commit offences time and again--five, 10, 15, 50, 100 or more offences within, say, six months. These are not just spree offenders, as the Home Secretary put it, although they exist. He is right to have learnt that from the inner London Crown Prosecution Service and other CPS areas. These are persistent offenders, people who make their living from crime, and who burgle time and again.
The three agencies--the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Court Service--should work closely together. It must be their joint and several duty to ensure that a multiple offender identified as having committed a significant number of crimes is brought before the court promptly, without delay. I entirely agree with the Home Secretary's intention to abolish the rule in the case of R. v. Khan. The judgment was given in earlier times, without a full understanding of the problem of multiple offenders. There needs to be a reasonable, representative
sample of the offences--three or four will be quite sufficient--and the offenders should then be brought before the court.
That is easier said than done, because it is not easy for one police area, Crown Prosecution Service area or Court Service area to know what is happening in another. The Government must bend their mind--as we sought to do, but we did not crack the problem, which is on-going--to find a way in which cases can be brought together. We must ensure that legislation allows them to be brought to any convenient court, so that they can be promptly tried. That will require an updating of the three agencies' computer facilities. I hope that it will be possible to build on the e-mail facilities which have been effectively piloted in parts of the CPS.
I now deal with the best use of resources. I shall make a few comments on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh). I am talking about the use of unqualified staff in court cases. The danger is that those on the administrative side always want to get things done quickly and cheaply, and they always ask for too much. They always want unqualified people to be able to do almost everything, on the basis that any idiot can present a case. On the other side, the professions and trade unions do not want anybody who is unqualified or not an established member of a body to be able to do anything that they cannot do at present, for fear that the floodgates will be opened and the service diminished.
The Bar has come forward with sensible objections to the gates being opened too wide. I shall not seek to prescribe on Second Reading exactly how we should do it--that is a matter for the Government and for careful consideration in Committee. In my view, if one can make small advances, one can get a significant benefit.
It must be recognised--this is the point that the Bar makes most effectively--that, when one is prosecuting, one is dealing with people's rights and liberties, and if nobody in court is properly qualified to evaluate the case, or if the case has been evaluated in the CPS by somebody who is not properly legally trained and experienced, injustice may follow.
The CPS was set up as a result of the Philips royal commission in the late 1970s, which was instituted by the previous Labour Government and picked up by the incoming Conservative Government in 1979, so that there was a proper, professional service to review prosecutions. That must not be unduly diluted.
Mr. Hawkins:
Even though non-lawyers might think that only uncontested hearings are at stake, so it does not matter, would my right hon. and learned Friend agree that the duty of a prosecutor is quite different from that of a defending advocate? A prosecutor has a duty to draw to the court's attention, even in an uncontested hearing, anything that may be important. That is why a qualified person needs to look into the matter to determine whether the court should be informed of anything bearing on the liberty of the subject.
Sir Nicholas Lyell:
That is a good point--I agree with my hon. Friend. The accused may be rather bemused. He may say that, although he took goods from a shop he did not mean to put them in his bag instead of the basket--but he did put them in his bag so he is guilty.
I believe it right to give justices' clerks greater powers--they are becoming ever better trained these days--to marshal and prepare cases, thereby allowing swifter action; but it is important that the dominant power remain with the magistrate, whether stipendiary or on the lay bench. We need the sound, local, common-sense skills of magistrates in the criminal justice system; those skills are immensely valuable. Therefore, although the idea represents an advance, it must be treated with care, so as not to dilute the strengths in the system that I have mentioned.
I come next to sentencing powers and--that awful word--disposals. The Bill contains an enormous variety of new orders: they concern anti-social neighbours, sex offenders, drug offenders, curfews, parenting, and so on. We shall need to look at them all very carefully. None will provide a complete answer, but magistrates will find it valuable to have a full quiver of sentences and disposals. These new ones are therefore to be welcomed in principle.
I want to say a word about the advisory council which is so much sought after by the senior judiciary in the House of Lords. We should carefully contemplate what they are saying, to see whether it can be melded into the Government's proposals in a sensible way. I do not pretend to endorse everything that is being argued for, but we do need a sensible and swift input from those who actually have to exercise sentencing powers. I hope that the Government will consider the idea carefully.
I welcome the Bill in general, but we will need to look closely at the detail. I am rather cynical about the Home Secretary's blithe claim that it fulfils 12 manifesto pledges. I have a feeling that manifesto pledges are not quite as valuable items of currency as some members of the public have hitherto thought them to be. No doubt that will all come out in the wash as we consider the Bill more closely.
We must also be careful not to be too bureaucratic.This is an extremely complex Bill. As a former Attorney-General, I say this against myself: it is extremely difficult to improve drafting, but, as I read the Bill, it passed through my mind that a good many of its clauses could have been drafted more simply and in a shorter form. Perhaps some of us will take a cockshy at introducing simpler and shorter clauses, if only so that we can be told by the Government that we have got our amendments wrong.
Mr. Terry Davis (Birmingham, Hodge Hill):
The Home Secretary described the purpose of the Bill as being to reduce crime and disorder. I welcome it for that reason, but also for three other reasons.
The first has not been mentioned by anyone in the debate--it is clause 33, which sweeps away the last remaining provision for the death penalty in our civilian
law. Many of us had thought that the death penalty was abolished 30 years ago, but it remains on the statute book for the offences of treason and piracy on the high seas. It is about time we tidied up our legislation and made the abolition total.
I am especially pleased because, as Lord Williams of Mostyn pointed out in the other place, clause 33 gives effect to a commitment by the Prime Minister at the Council of Europe summit in October, when the Heads of Government of 40 European countries pledged themselves to work for the abolition of the death penalty in Europe.
It is right and proper to sweep away the dust that has been gathering in some corners of our statute books, and clause 33 does precisely that. It is more than 150 years since anyone was hanged for piracy, and more than 50 years since anyone was hanged for treason. Everyone knows that those offences would not carry the death penalty today, so it is right to tidy up the legislation and to remove any remaining excuse for other countries that still operate the death penalty in Europe to shelter behind the United Kingdom. It is an obsolete provision.
I am glad that our noble Friends Lord Judd and Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, members of our delegation to the Council of Europe Assembly, took part in the debate on an amendment tabled by my noble Friend Lord Archer of Sandwell, who deserves to be congratulated on having taken the initiative in this matter in the other place. That is the first reason for welcoming the Bill.
My second reason is clause 40, which provides for time limits to be specified for serious cases to be heard in court. It was, I believe, the shadow Home Secretary who said that justice delayed was justice denied. Of course, there must be proper provision for the preparation of defences and prosecutions, but when most people argue that cases should be brought to trial as quickly as possible, they draw attention to the effect on the defendant and his family of waiting for the case to be heard.
My own interest in the point arises from my having seen the effect not on a defendant but on a victim's family. It can have a terrible effect on victims and their families if cases take a long time to come to court. We can all imagine how relatives feel when someone has been killed and it then takes more than a year for the case to be heard and the guilty person to be sentenced.
Recently in Birmingham, a 17-year-old student walking through the city centre was the subject of an unprovoked assault by a man who hit him twice on the head with a bottle, punched him three times, knocked him unconscious to the ground, and fractured his skull. The student died. The man who had killed him was arrested within a matter of days.
The killing took place in June 1996; the case came to court in October 1997. Throughout that period, the victim's family had to attend one hearing after another, each time going through the emotional stress of expecting the case to be decided--only to find that it was adjourned to a later date, time and again. They had to go through that process for more than a year, waiting for justice to be done.
This is plainly wrong. My investigations into the reasons for the delay show that it was partly the result of the actions of the defence. It took 11 months from committal to the case being heard in Crown court. Five of those 11 months were the responsibility of the defence, but the rest of the delay was caused by the prosecution, and, in effect, by the legal system.
I am still not clear about who is responsible. From discussions with Ministers, it appears that nobody is responsible, because responsibility is split between Departments. If ever there was a case for a Minister of Justice, this is it. One person should accept responsibility for the administration of justice, but instead it seems to depend on the convenience of judges and the performance of the Court Service. No one is to blame for delay, and no one accepts responsibility for it, which is unreasonable and unfair, especially on the victim's family.
The third reason for welcoming the Bill is the provision in clause 75 for sentencing guidelines to be made publicly available. They should not only be made available, but be subject to public debate. People are entitled to discuss what is an appropriate range of sentences for a particular crime. In the case that I have described, Royston Worrell, the man who killed the student Andrew Steventon, was found not guilty of murder, but was convicted of manslaughter.
When sentencing Royston Worrell, the judge reminded the court that he had committed an unprovoked assault: he had not been attacked or intimidated in any way, and had killed a young man who was backing away from him and who had offered virtually no defence. In the words of the judge, Royston Worrell wanted to show that he was cock of the walk. He showed no remorse for the death of Andrew Steventon, and there was no suggestion that he had a mental illness.
Royston Worrell was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, and the family of Andrew Steventon have been told by the probation service that the sentence means that Royston Worrell will automatically--it might be better to say, probably--be released after being in prison for two years and seven months.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General is entitled to appeal against sentences, but he decided that the sentence was not unduly lenient. In my opinion and that of Andrew Steventon's family, it is unduly lenient--this man killed without provocation. However, when I went to see my right hon. and learned Friend, he convinced me that the sentence is not unduly lenient in comparison with similar cases of brutal manslaughter--undue lenience is not an absolute standard.
I am not in favour of mandatory sentences for manslaughter or for most other crimes. We can all imagine extenuating circumstances even in manslaughter cases. A person who has killed may have been subjected to provocation, frightening intimidation or even sexual abuse over a long period; in the end, something snaps, and that person commits manslaughter. However, an unprovoked assault with a bottle on an innocent passer-by followed by three punches to the head--the assailant travelled a distance of 20 metres when throwing them--deserves more than two years and seven months in prison, most of which would have been spent in custody on remand.
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