Sarah Russell

I draw attention to my declaration of interests: I am a solicitor. I continue to have two concerns about the Bill as drafted, and I am very grateful to the Government for changing their position on clause 3. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Corby and East Northamptonshire (Lee Barron), who said that the right to elect is being abused and probably is not critical, but there are two things that are. First, I support amendment 70 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson) on the importance of the extension of legal aid in the magistrates court. As solicitors, we have a saying: the lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client. As solicitors, we do not attempt to represent ourselves, even in our areas of interest—I have given employment law advice to an employment lawyer. Yet we expect lay people to go into the magistrates court with sentencing powers of now up to two years with no legal advice and representation. When the Justice Committee asked what evaluation had been made of the impact on unrepresented litigants in person on the Crown court backlog, the answer from the MOJ was that no evaluation had been done. I feel strongly that we need to look at that as one of the causes of delay. The second matter I want to draw attention to is that sentences under the unduly lenient sentence scheme only apply in the Crown court. When we double the magistrates courts’ potential sentencing powers to two years, we will take very large numbers of offences out of the purview of the unduly lenient sentence scheme overnight. Fear of domestic violence, stalking involving fear of violence, coercive and controlling behaviour, and many first-time sexual offences will be likely to attract sentences of less than two years. They will be heard in the magistrates court, and if those sentences are unduly lenient, there will be nothing that we can do about it.