Member

Secondly, the Secretary of State’s approval of guidelines and, even more so, the capacity for her to rewrite the guidelines are incompatible with the independence of the Sentencing Council. The Sentencing Council could be obliged to publish in its name a guideline with which it fundamentally disapproved. In the law as it stands, the Sentencing Council must consult the Lord Chancellor and the Justice Committee—I see the Chairman, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), in his place—but that is not the same as the Sentencing Council requiring ministerial approval to publish the guidelines. It is, of course, ministerial approval that is proposed in the amendment, not parliamentary approval—those are very different things. We are discussing a parliamentary decision about the guidelines, not allowing a Minister to make that decision for himself or herself.