Lord Keen of Elie (Con)

My Lords, my Amendments 1 and 27 concern the interaction between the presumption of suspended sentences in Clause 1 and the application of credit for a guilty plea at the first opportunity. In Committee, I raised what I consider to be a straightforward but important point of drafting and of principle: whether the presumption for a suspended sentence is intended to apply to the sentence before or after credit is given for a guilty plea. The purpose of that amendment was to probe how widely the Government intend this presumption to operate. The Minister’s response in Committee confirmed that the presumption would apply after guilty plea credit had been awarded. That confirmation is important, as it means that the presumption of suspended sentences is not confined to offences attracting sentences of up to 12 months, as has been repeatedly suggested, but in practice extends to offences carrying a sentence of up to 18 months, which is of course beyond the sentencing provisions of the magistrates’ court and takes us into to the realm of what is generally regarded as serious crime. The Minister opposed this amendment on the basis that it would create inconsistency. He argued that the presumption would not apply where an early guilty plea reduced a sentence to 12 months or less but could still apply where other forms of mitigation achieved the same effect. That objection, I say respectfully, misunderstands both the purpose and the effect of this amendment. The distinction between credit for a guilty plea and other forms of mitigation is deliberate and long established. Credit for a guilty plea is not mitigation in the ordinary sense. It is a structured formulaic reduction applied for a specific policy purpose: to encourage early admissions of guilt and spare victims the ordeal of trial. Indeed, Parliament and the Sentencing Council have always treated it separately. This amendment seeks to ensure that the starting point for the court, whether an offence ordinarily attracts custody or suspension, is determined by the seriousness of the offence and not by a subsequent procedural discount. Without this amendment, Clause 1 operates in a way that the Government have never openly acknowledged. An offender facing a sentence of up to 18 months’ imprisonment can, by entering an early guilty plea, reduce that sentence by one-third and thereby bring himself within the automatic presumption of suspension. That is not a marginal effect but a substantial expansion of the scope of Clause 1. That is what I described in Committee as opening Pandora’s box. Once the presumption is allowed to apply after a guilty plea credit, it ceases to be confined to genuinely low-level offending. Offences such as robbery, serious assault or the possession of knives—offences that Parliament and the public would reasonably expect to attract immediate custody—are surreptitiously drawn into the presumption, even though they can carry sentences of 15 months or more. If that is the Government’s intention, it should be stated plainly, but if, as Ministers have repeatedly suggested, the presumption is aimed only at genuinely short sentences of up to 12 months, this amendment is necessary to give effect to that stated policy. We also heard a wider concern in Committee that I think was left unacknowledged: by allowing guilty plea credit to determine eligibility for suspension, the Bill risks creating perverse incentives. Offenders may come to believe that pleading guilty is not merely a matter of sentence reduction but a route to avoiding custody altogether, and that risks undermining public confidence in the justice system. This amendment does not undermine the policy of encouraging guilty pleas, nor does it widen the scope of custody. It is a technical clarification designed to ensure that Clause 1 operates as the Government have publicly described it and not in a far broader and unintended manner. If the Minister cannot give us these assurances, I will seek to divide the House.