Contribution
The Lord Chancellor must be living in a parallel universe if she is giving herself a pat on the back today. The truth is she has completely lost control of the justice system. She sat on her hands for weeks and took seven days to gather her thoughts and put her views in writing to the Sentencing Council. Her incompetence took this down to the wire.
Magistrates and judges were updated by the press office of the Sentencing Council only at midday that the guidelines due to come into force had in effect been suspended. That raises the very real prospect that magistrates and judges sitting from 10am this morning were unaware of this chaotic last-minute change and sentenced people under guidelines that the Justice Secretary herself has conceded are two-tier. But it gets worse. In that very email to thousands of judges and magistrates sent just 90 minutes ago, the Sentencing Council states:
“we remain of the view that the guidelines are necessary and appropriate”.
Confusion reigns. They are being told one thing by the Lord Chancellor and another by the Sentencing Council. Who really is in charge here? Yet again, the Justice Secretary has been humiliated and undermined by activist judges seeking to undermine the will of this place—our Parliament. Her authority has been shredded—she is being treated as a two-tier, second-tier Justice Secretary.
This situation was entirely preventable if the Justice Secretary had simply put party politics to one side and backed our Bill weeks ago to restore accountability and empower her to actually control justice policy, but the Labour party blocked it. If the Prime Minister has been tricked into sitting at the front of the docklands light railway thinking that he is in charge, as his chief of staff mocked him for the other day, the Lord Chancellor has chosen to sit there in the passenger seat allowing the judiciary to take charge. She decided to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, all-powerful to be impotent.
Even after this complete shambles, the Lord Chancellor will not even re-establish ministerial oversight. We are told via frantic press briefings that her Bill, which we have not even seen yet, will surgically remove these two-tier sentencing guidelines. That does not tackle the root cause of the problem at all, which is an activist legal quango that holds views completely divergent to the public, to Parliament and—now we are told—to the Government. Unless she follows the formula of the Bill produced by Conservative MPs, we will be back here time and again to unwind the next piece of madness coming out of the council.
Take the Sentencing Council’s immigration guidelines that water down sentences for immigration offences below the 12-month threshold for automatic deportation: if published, it will mean hundreds of illegal migrants and foreign national offenders will avoid deportation every single year. It will blow a hole in border security. It even waters down the maximum life sentence for people smugglers that was legislated for just under a year ago. It completely disregards parliamentary sovereignty.
At our last exchange, the Justice Secretary said there would be no two-tier justice on her watch. Well, there it is—and it is worse than that. On 2 January, her own Department—not the Sentencing Council—published guidance ordering the prioritisation of bail for ethnic minorities and transgender people, continuing a practice introduced under Gordon Brown. Contrary to the misinformation peddled by her press office, the Department produced new guidance on pre-sentencing reports that have been in force for months, which state that probation officers should consider the “culture” of an offender and whether they have suffered “intergenerational trauma” from “historical events”. Well, that is cultural relativism, which violates the rule of law and puts the British public at risk. This time, nobody is to blame other than her. It is her Department; it is black and white; it is two-tier justice.
I have some questions. Will the Justice Secretary reassure the House that nobody was sentenced this morning under guidelines that she concedes are two tier? Can she honestly say at the Dispatch Box that she has confidence in the head of the Sentencing Council, Lord Justice Davis, given that he has brought it into total disrepute—yes or no? If she can, is she aware that he took to the airwaves yesterday, in an astonishing departure from the expected standards of judicial conduct, to advocate for abolishing short sentences, especially for hyper-prolific offenders, effectively instructing lower courts to follow suit? It is time for him to go, and if she will not sack him for that, what will it take?
Does the Justice Secretary have confidence in Johanna Robinson, another member of the Sentencing Council, who took a moral objection to border control and described the Illegal Migration Act 2023 as appalling? Lastly, will the Justice Secretary change the guidance that her own Department is producing and which has created a two-tier Probation Service? Or is it, once again on her watch, two-tier justice under two-tier Keir?