Sir Jeremy Wright

Sir Jeremy Wright

Conservative — Kenilworth and Southam

Speaking in the House of Commons on 22 April 2025

Debate

Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill

Contribution

The Lord Chancellor has just given us, very helpfully, the list of matters that might be relevantly considered in a pre-sentence report. As she has said, however, one of the items on that list is “personal circumstances”, and that is what the Bill will remove from the Sentencing Council’s discretion. May I ask her why she has not used in the Bill the language that is included in the explanatory notes? Paragraph 8 states that the Bill will “prevent differential treatment… It does this by preventing the creation of a presumption regarding whether a pre-sentence report should be obtained based on an offender’s membership of a particular demographic cohort”. That strikes me as a much narrower exclusion, and perhaps one better targeted at the problem that the Lord Chancellor has, in my view, rightly identified.

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