Contribution
My Lords, in the first group, we considered what we regard as the unsatisfactory nature of this Bill. My Amendment 5 is directed to ensuring that guidelines promote the use of pre-sentence reports as a general rule. As has been mentioned, there has been a very serious decline in the use of pre-sentence reports. As the Minister said in Committee and others have said today—notably, the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham—there has been a 44% reduction in the number of pre-sentence reports ordered and produced over the last decade. That flows in part from the effect of a recognised lack of resources for the Probation Service to produce these reports over that period.
Not only that, but the reduction in numbers has been accompanied by a recent decline in the quality of the reports produced by the courts. Although, as the noble Lord, Lord Meston, said, some years back there may have been an improvement in the quality of pre-sentence reports, contemporary evidence suggests that there has been a significant decline over the last 10 years. I do not believe that that decline is attributable to a lack of commitment on the part of individual probation officers. However, we should recognise that the demoralisation that has taken place in the Probation Service has been very serious indeed. That has been partly the effect of the ill-starred changes to and reorganisation of the whole of the probation services, initiated by the previous Government. The later reversal, while welcome, merely proved that the whole experiment was profoundly unsettling and damaging to the probation services as a whole.
But the declining quality of pre-sentence reports has been principally the result of a lack of resources allocated to the production of individual reports, particularly the time probation officers have had to prepare them. These reports need to be thoughtful, and thoroughly and individually researched, with a real assessment of the most appropriate sentences in individual cases. The reports need to consider the individual circumstances of offenders with care, and officers need the time to do that. There needs to be much more opportunity for officers carefully to consider individually suitable community sentences and to research their availability. They need to have the time and resources to consider the conditions that might be appropriately attached to such community sentences, along with the employment and housing, and opportunities and risks, that need to be considered in individual cases.
In discussing these issues, we should not lose sight of the central features of sentencing hearings. Pre-sentence reports are the only real independent sources of information for judges about the personal circumstances of offenders and of the possible disposals and their suitability. Judges cannot get this assistance from speeches in mitigation by defence advocates, however well-researched and argued they might be. That is primarily, of course, because such speeches are delivered on instructions—the instructions of the offenders the advocates represent—and are not, therefore, independent. But it is also because the Probation Service has an unrivalled expertise in advising judges on appropriate sentencing. Given the resources and training that dedicated probation officers receive, they can make all the difference to sentencing and can help offenders to make their best efforts to turn their lives around. This is not only a civilised and humanitarian outcome; in turning offenders away from crime, and in reducing reoffending and the huge personal costs to victims and families associated with it, it brings substantial societal benefit as well.
The case for this amendment is that we need to return to the principle that once underlay pre-sentencing reports in practice, as well as in theory, and certainly in every case where the sentencing decision was between custody and community sentences: that the judge should have pre-sentence reports of the highest quality possible in all such cases. During the course of the noble Lord’s tenure as Prisons Minister, he has made it clear that it is his ambition to bring more investment into the Probation Service and to increase the number of probation officers—which should also improve, I would add, the retention of probation officers within the service and raise standards generally. For us, this is a crucial issue.
I am very grateful to the Minister for his constructive engagement with me and others during the passage of the Bill. If he can convince us from the Dispatch Box—I am very hopeful that he will—that his ambition is also the Government’s ambition for the Probation Service and pre-sentence reports, I will not press my amendment to a vote. However, the converse also follows. I await what the Minister has to say in response. I beg to move.