Contribution
My Lords, perhaps rather surprisingly, I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, in seeking to remove Clause 18—but for polar opposite reasons. The noble Lord seeks to abolish the Sentencing Council; I wish to protect it from interference.
Abolition would be a retrograde step, which would undermine consistency in sentencing and destroy a structure that has evolved over 25 years. It has ensured that both sentences imposed and the impact of those sentences are properly informed by evidence, research and consultation, so I oppose the abolition of the Sentencing Council.
I shall explain why Clause 18, which requires the Sentencing Council to publish a business plan, over which the Lord Chancellor appears to be given control, should not stand part of the Bill. I shall also speak to Amendments 81 to 83 standing in my name, which seek to remove the veto that the Bill puts in the hands of the Lord Chancellor over the publication and introduction of sentencing guidelines.
First, I will spend a couple of minutes outlining the background to the Sentencing Council, to which the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, has made some reference already. The Sentencing Council was established by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. The Act makes provision for 14 members, eight of whom are judicial, ranging from at least one Lord Justice to a magistrate, and six non-judicial, who must be drawn from those with experience of criminal cases in the courts, from policy, from those familiar with sentencing and the interests of victims, and from those who understand statistics and are involved in the academic study of sentencing and rehabilitation of offenders. The DPP, a senior police officer and a victims’ representative are members.
The Sentencing Council produces guidelines or amendments to guidelines in draft, having conducted extensive research. Those drafts are then consulted upon widely and, in particular, both the Justice Committee of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor are statutory consultees. Moreover, and importantly, the Lord Chancellor has a representative, who attends all meetings of the Sentencing Council and may speak at such meetings.
The Sentencing Council is, by statute, charged with monitoring the effect of guidelines in promoting consistency in sentencing and on public confidence. It must report on the effect of its guidelines on prison places and resources for probation. As the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, has noted, courts must follow guidelines unless it is in the interests of justice not to do so.
The Sentencing Council did not spring from nowhere; it was preceded by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, a creature of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. That produced guidelines to which the courts were required to have regard, but it was a much less sophisticated and less well-informed body than the Sentencing Council. Before that, the Sentencing Advisory Panel began work in 1999, and its function was to advise the Court of Appeal when it was considering producing a guideline case.
Before that, the Court of Appeal had no structured help from anywhere. The responsibility for producing guideline cases rested entirely with the Court of Appeal. In fact, they were relatively few and far between, so those who were sentencing offenders had to delve through a four-volume, loose-leaf work, which, from memory, was updated a couple of times a year. What followed was much better.
Clause 18 requires the Sentencing Council to submit a business plan to the Lord Chancellor for approval after the beginning of a financial year, setting out what guidelines it proposes to prepare and identifying its other activities. If the Lord Chancellor approves, the Sentencing Council would be required to publish the business case. At Second Reading I asked what this was all about—what its purpose was and what the consequences would be of a failure of the Lord Chancellor to approve. With respect to the Minister, there was no explanation forthcoming in his response at the end of the debate.
This provision, Clause 18, is, frankly, pointless. Failure to approve would not prevent the Sentencing Council doing what it planned to do. It looks like an attempt at a control mechanism of some sort—or at least a stick to wave over the Sentencing Council. The Sentencing Council is already under a statutory duty to publish an annual report on all its activities at the end of the financial year, with detailed statutory provisions of what must be contained within that report. With the greatest respect to the Government, if they are unable to come up with a coherent explanation, indeed any explanation, of what mischief this clause is designed to remedy and what its intended effect is, it really should not be in the Bill.