Member

Amendment 3 states that all Sentencing Council guidelines involving pre-sentence reports must be agreed by the Secretary of State, and that the Secretary of State may, if she so chooses, rewrite those guidelines. There are two problems with that. First, the Lord Chancellor has made clear and sensible distinctions between guidelines that relate to matters of policy and those that relate to matters of judicial discretion in specific sentencing cases, with the latter being matters for the judiciary alone. I am not convinced that all conceivable guidelines relating to pre-sentence reports will qualify as matters of policy, so taking political control of all such guidelines would not be appropriate.