Baroness Hamwee (LD)

My Lords, I want to say a word about Amendment 84 on sentencing remarks. I was proposing to leave it until the Victims and Courts Bill, but this gives me an initial run at it, as it were. I am glad to have the opportunity to ask the Minister for an update on the MoJ’s work on this. At a 3 September meeting of the Constitution Committee, of which I am a member, I asked the then Lord Chancellor about progress in this area. She said: “I do not believe we are far from having a tech solution that meets the test of accuracy … we are testing market solutions for speed and accuracy. Then we will need to take a view on operational viability and how quickly it could be rolled out”. She said: “It is a long process, and it has a cost attached to it”, but went on to emphasise that “accuracy … is the problem at the moment”. If the Minister could update the Committee, that would be very welcome. The point in general is not only about sentencing remarks. My honourable friend for Richmond Park has been pursuing the matter of transcripts. She realises that this is important not only with sentencing remarks but with full transcripts of trials—victims, if that is a word I can use, when there has been a not guilty finding, need help to understand what has happened. As the noble Lord has said, access after the event, to go back and look to see what was said, is very important. None of us relies on our memory—we all look at Hansard, for instance. The publication within two sitting days may be overambitious, when I look at what the Lord Chancellor said—but then she has perhaps not met our Hansard writers, who do it in much less than two days.