Criminal Justice Bill [back to previous text]

Ian Lucas (Wrexham): I am following the hon. Gentleman's argument closely and I welcome his Column Number: 874 general support for the amendment. Why does he feel that the guidelines that the new body will issue would be any different in their effect from the sentencing guidelines that the courts regularly follow? Mr. Grieve: The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point but, if I have interpreted correctly the direction in which we are going, sentencing guidelines, under the Government's proposals, should become a much more regular tool for providing a structure within which sentencing should take place. However, the judiciary must use the guidelines properly, and the Lord Chief Justice and the council must operate properly. That is my interpretation of the new sentencing council. I accept that the judiciary might fail to do what is intended. I must say that, in my slight experience, there are huge areas of criminal law within the scope of sentencing guidelines that remain extremely woolly. If current sentencing guidelines were the determining factor on sentences, ''Archbold'' would not be worded as it is. ''Archbold'' refers people round the houses to determine what the correct sentence should be. Some of the cases used are 30 or 40 years old. The new guidelines should all be much more apparent and clear. However, the hon. Gentleman is quite right—it may turn out not to be the case, and the Minister will doubtless enlighten us on this in due course. However, I had assumed that, in putting the guidelines council in this form in this statute, it was the Government's intention that the guidelines council would in future be a much more high-profile and prominent body for laying down sentencing guidelines. If I am wrong, the Minister can either interrupt me or deal with the matter later. Mr. Allen: Obviously, no one can speak for the Minister, but the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) may like to consider that the guidelines are part of a wider process, and that part of the Government's intention is to involve the public. That would take us to a qualitatively different dimension, the intention being that the public understand sentencing—probably for the first time. Mr. Grieve: I agree. I return to the point that I was making, which might technically be possible if the models that the Minister or the hon. Member for Nottingham, North are proposing are adopted, although I am bound to say that I find that the latter's model gives me greater reassurance that that will happen. That is one of the reasons why I was attracted to it. I do not intend to say more at this stage, but I shall have the opportunity to speak, on a later group of amendments, about the level of parliamentary involvement. The amendments could be hitched to what the hon. Gentleman proposes; they could equally well be hitched to what the Minister now proposes. They raise a discrete issue, so I shall not develop the argument now. One of the public's complaints is that they have a sense of powerlessness when trying to make their views known on sentence tariffs or guidelines with which they disagree. They are right to make their views Column Number: 875 known, because the judiciary are effectively isolated—deliberately so—from such pressure. The pressure lands instead on the Minister, who says that there is nothing that he can do about it—unless the tariff for the offence is changed. That is how we got into the business of mandatory five-year sentences for gun possession—a sentence that had to be watered down in the light of reality, once it was appreciated that exceptions have to be made. That is a classic example of how Ministers have had to respond, while passing the buck to the judges. If there was a level of parliamentary involvement, as I shall propose at a later stage, there would be an immediate channel to enable people to say that they did not like things as they stood. Politicians will not be able to duck that issue. However, I shall return to that point in due course. In the meantime, I thank the hon. Member for Nottingham, North for raising the issue, and I look forward to hearing the views of other members of the Committee. John Mann (Bassetlaw): I rise briefly to support the principle that we are discussing, assisted by the amendment moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North. Should any journalist be present, I should point out that I was recently mistaken for him by a newspaper and that many of his proposals were attributed to me. I did not, of course, deny it. I want to speak about the principle rather than specifics, because it is clearly a probing amendment. We rightly heard from the hon. Member for Beaconsfield about the public's perceptions and complaints. Another interesting perspective is shared in my area by the police—and by criminals. It is about the absurdity of some of the sentences that are passed on drug offenders. Indeed, I pointed out to the Minister that such absurdities had crept into the Bill in a number of places; for instance, fines are proposed as a sanction for not fulfilling the criteria of community sentences. The absurdity is that addicted heroin offenders, who are responsible for 95 per cent. of all crime in the western part of my constituency, will, when fined, go out and steal more to fund their addiction. They tend not to have reserves of cash. Criminals point to that absurdity. Some did so vocally in my public inquiry, and the police accorded and made exactly the same point at every level, from local constable to chief constable. Therefore it is crucial that we have a sentencing system that is thoughtful and responsive and listens to the community. I would also observe that the Home Office and the legal profession have a long obsession for determining what is appropriate. I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North goes some way to add to that by incorporating the probation service into the clause. The amendment proposes involving the probation service in making judgments on what sentence is appropriate for a drugs offender. The probation service does have expertise, training and experience in these matters, but in a general, not a specialist way. How will whoever is appointed to the Column Number: 876 guidelines council go about consulting the wider community? I doubt that putting a drug-addicted repeat offender from my area on such a body would contribute greatly to the debate. However, if we discuss the issues with such people we may find that they are in accord with the police that there is a need for stricter sentencing. I reached that surprising conclusion after discussions with many of my constituents: often drugs offenders want to be sentenced and sent to prison because it gives them a structured form of treatment and detoxing, albeit one that is expensive for the state. Some will admit offences that they did not commit in the hope of receiving a prison sentence rather than a fine. Consultation of that kind is critical. My final point is that there is a very good case for introducing drugs courts to deal with such offences. They would be dealt with by experts rather than be thrown into the general legal process. We will leave that to the consideration of the Minister and the Department. Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome): I support the thrust of the amendments. We are not discussing their details; we are discussing the principles enshrined in them. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North is right in two respects: first, many people feel a disconnection between what they consider to be right and effective and the sentencing that they see reported in the press. We must deal with that sense of disconnection. The second principle in which the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right is that a Sentencing Guidelines Council, however it may be constituted, must take a long-term and reasoned view of what is appropriate. It should, as far as possible, resist the day-to-day fashion of the screaming headlines. It would be easy to slate the tabloid editors as being the problem. However, although it is true that they partly lead public opinion, they also reflect it. We must understand that. The difficulty comes when the Executive find themselves interfering with the judiciary, as they undoubtedly do directly and indirectly, as a result of screaming headlines that may or may not be based on a reasoned approach. At the moment, we have both a Prime Minister and a Home Secretary who make ex cathedra statements about such matters. That has an effect. I could go into one of my regular diatribes about the position of the Lord Chancellor, but I am sure that you, Mr. Cran, would not wish me to do so. However, we have the anomalous position of an individual who is a member of the Executive, the legislature and the judiciary simultaneously. Of course that means that the Executive have an effect on the judiciary, irrespective of claims of independence—the head of our judicial processes sits in the Cabinet, takes judicial decisions there, and assumes Cabinet responsibility. I thought for a moment, when the hon. Member for Nottingham, North was introducing his comments, that he had finally found a situation in which that anomaly made sense; he seemed to have the Lord Chancellor chairing the council—one person embodying the three branches: legislature, Executive Column Number: 877 and judiciary—but he corrected himself and restored the position, quite properly, to the Lord Chief Justice. 3 pm I was conscious, when the remarks of the Lord Chief Justice were announced at Christmas, that one of the first people in my constituency to write to me on the subject was a serving police officer, a chief superintendent. He wanted me to know how much he disagreed with what he believed had been said. He had gathered what had been said via the newspapers and it had not been accurately reported. Nevertheless, he had real concerns. We often ignore the views of the police on such issues, and we are unwise to do so; they are part of the process. However, so are a lot of other people. The benefit of what the hon. Gentleman has proposed is that it extends membership beyond the very narrow field of the judiciary to a wider circle. I appreciate the arguments in the other direction. I understand why the judiciary feel that their independence might be sullied by contact with the outside world, but I do not accept that that is the case. For one moment, I misinterpreted the hon. Member for Beaconsfield and thought that he was saying that the guidelines issued by a Sentencing Guidelines Council would be less acceptable to judges if they were contaminated with the views of lay people. I do not think, having heard his further comments, that he did say that. That would be an unacceptable position. Of course, we accept and respect the expertise of such people. They have a leading role to play and we must not fetter the discretion of the judiciary in dealing with individual cases. In terms of the broad guidelines, as the hon. Member for Nottingham, North said, the community has a role to play. There is a danger of tokenism—people might be appointed as ''the community'', ''the outside world'' or ''the public''. We have all witnessed situations in which that has happened—the people's peers were an example of how not to produce representatives of the people. It happens in users councils and in quangos; people are appointed to positions in order to represent a community of which they have scant knowledge, and with which they have little connection. We must be careful how we appoint people. The hon. Gentleman's suggestion as to the approximate spread is right. There are interest groups and individuals who have an informed opinion to bring to the table. One such group is Members of this House; we are representatives of Everyman. We may do our job imperfectly because, as we all know, the House is not fully representative in many ways. However, it is the best that is on offer. It is important for Parliament to be involved, and the hon. Gentleman was right to say that we should not take such issues from the Floor of the House, where parliamentarians are subject to the same pressures as those that I described for the Executive. It is right that Parliament should, in a considered way, have a voice. Like other members of the Committee, I find it frustrating when people write to me about judicial matters and they simply cannot understand why I can do nothing to affect outcomes that they see as grossly unjust. Of course, it is not for Column Number: 878 us to interfere with judicial discretion, but this is one area in which we can set the parameters within which the judicial professions work, in a way that helps everyone. To return to my original point, the amendments are very valuable, and I hope that the Minister will give them due consideration. I do not expect him to accept them in the way that he did the previous group, but I hope that they will give him a basis on which to talk to members of the judiciary. They may have serious qualms about such proposals, but they may find that there is a formula that is acceptable to them and which reassures the public and improves the system.

©Parliamentary copyright 2003	Prepared 6 February 2003