Member

None the less, as I said, without a pre-sentence report, the number of options that can be imposed are limited, and with a pre-sentence report, sentencers have more options, so whether sentencers are encouraged to order pre-sentence reports is not irrelevant. My concern is that the way in which the Sentencing Council has gone about this is unhelpful. However—the right hon. Lady will hear me expand on this—it would be wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and it is also important to recognise that some of the Sentencing Council guidelines are profoundly helpful to sentencers; they indicate that we should, in many cases, get relevant information when considering individual sentencing decisions. For all those reasons, we should fetter the sentencing process only as much as we need to in order to meet legitimate policy objectives, where genuine questions of policy arise. That is, after all, what the Government said they were trying to do here.