Member

When drafting the Bill, the Government considered how best to meet our policy objective of ensuring equality before the law. As part of this, we carefully considered whether the Bill could more tightly limit the restrictions it places on sentencing guidelines about pre-sentence reports referring to select cohorts of offenders based on their personal characteristics. This approach would have been similar in spirit to the proposed amendment in meaning that the Sentencing Council would be free to direct sentencers to obtain a pre-sentence report for cohorts that were not specified in the Bill. This is not straightforward, as we quickly enter territory where we would be treating different groups in different ways, prioritising some over others.