Contribution
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for tabling Amendments 215 and 216 respectively. I have great respect for both the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. The noble Baroness’s background means that she knows more than most about the corrosive experience of shoplifting and the effect it can have on those working in the retail industry. The noble Lord’s distinguished career as a police officer gives him great authority to speak about the challenges to police forces and their obligations to society that they should be fulfilling. I reassure both the noble Lord and the noble Baroness that we are all on the same side on this. This is one of these situations where I am very keen to work with Members from all sides of your Lordships’ Committee to ensure that we deal with this social and economic menace efficiently and effectively.
On Amendment 215, I will repeat what I said a few moments ago: this Government take repeat and prolific offending extremely seriously. However, sentencing in individual cases must be a matter for our independent judiciary, and it must take into account all the circumstances of the offence and the offender, as well as the statutory purposes of sentencing. Your Lordships will, of course, be aware that the courts have a broad range of sentencing powers to deal effectively and appropriately with offenders.
As some of your Lordships may be aware, until relatively recently I was a judge in the Crown Court, and I sentenced my fair share of shoplifters. There was a complete spectrum of those offenders, from the destitute, homeless young mother stealing nappies for her baby at one end to the shameless, organised shoplifting gangs who terrify and terrorise shop workers. As the sentencing judge, there was a toolbox of disposals of increasing seriousness available to me, so that I could match the appropriate sentence to the offender on a case-by-case basis. These included discharges, fines, community sentences, suspended sentences with requirements and custodial sentences where appropriate.
Previous convictions are already a statutory aggravating factor, with the sentencing guidelines making it clear that, when determining the sentence, sentencers must consider the nature and relevance of previous convictions and the time elapsed since the previous conviction. But that repeats what is, in fact, common sense and what every sentencer knows. From my own experience, I can tell the Committee that the more frequently a defendant appears before the court, having gone out and done exactly the same thing that he or she had just been sentenced for, the more exasperated the judge becomes, who then starts imposing tougher and tougher sentences.
Despite the popular caricatures, judges do live in the real world. While sentencing a shoplifter to prison as a standard proposition will seem harsh, it can and does happen if the court concludes that there is no other way of stopping them. Importantly, this Government will introduce a whole range of options that will ramp up the community and suspended sentence powers for judges. In other words, the toolbox is getting fancier and more extensive.
As the noble Lord, Lord Davies, has said, sentencers are already able to impose a robust range of electronic monitoring requirements on anyone serving their sentence in the community. Where the court imposes curfews, exclusion zones and/or an alcohol ban, offenders must be electronically monitored, subject to individual suitability. I note the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, about the effect on police resources. However, quite a lot of the monitoring is done by the Probation Service. As the noble Baroness is probably aware, the Government are putting a lot of additional resources back into the Probation Service to enable it to do this.
Soon judges will be able to add driving bans and bans on offenders attending pubs, bars, clubs and desirable social activities like sports and concerts, as well as some tough new geographical restriction zones, to the existing tools.