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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone, and particularly to reply to your near neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), whom I congratulate on securing the debate and bringing up the matter of judicial scorecards.
I have, of course, noted the question that my hon. Friend put to the Justice Secretary during oral questions about whether steps would be taken to ensure that judges and magistrates were informed of incidents of reoffending of every offender they had sentenced. As my hon. Friend has made clear, he is aiming for feedback and public transparency for individual sentencers on the effectiveness of their sentencing practices, so that they are able to identify where something is wrong with their individual approach. I have listened to my hon. Friend very carefully, with my usual level of interest, and I concur with the Justice Secretary that his suggestion is interesting.
My hon. Friend knows from previous debates we have had on foreign national prisoners that I very much welcome his interest, and his providing a spur to the system to ensure that we are kept up to the mark in areas of public interest. However, I am going to have to be reasonably plain with him here: yes, the topic is interesting, but I am unsympathetic with the particular matter of individual judicial accountability by way of scorecards for judges.
Let me explain why. We need to acknowledge that this topic raises issues of significant constitutional importance, and I want to touch on those before I address some of the other matters that my hon. Friend mentioned. We might not have quite enough time for a full debate on the whole of penal policy, the issue that he raised at the end of his remarks, but if I end up having enough time, I will cheerfully move into that area.
The rule of law is, of course, the foundation of our democracy. For that tenet to be real, it is imperative that the independence of the judiciary is maintained. As my hon. Friend will recognise, that is particularly relevant in respect of sentencing decisions. Parliament has established the offence and sentencing framework that the judiciary apply in individual cases, and the courts have a duty to follow sentencing guidelines, which are issued by the independent Sentencing Council to promote greater consistency in sentencing while maintaining judicial independence. If courts depart from those guidelines in the interest of justice, they must explain in open court why they are doing so.
Although the sentencing decisions of the judiciary are rightly independent, they do not operate in an accountability vacuum. Checks and balances within the current system, such as the right of appeal, operate within the public domain. If certain sentences are seen as too lenient, the Attorney-General can appeal them. Equally, if it is felt that the final sentence is too harsh relative to the circumstances of the case, the defendant has the right to appeal. Like the hearings at which offenders are sentenced, such appeals are heard in public. The Sentencing Council has a duty to monitor the operation of its sentencing guidelines. Part of that involves considering the frequency and extent to which those handing down sentences depart from the guidelines, the factors that influence sentences imposed by courts and the effect of guidelines on consistency in sentencing and on public confidence in the criminal justice system.
More generally, the judiciary support efforts towards greater transparency that allow the public improved access to sentencing outcomes for individual crimes in their local area while bearing in mind any reporting restrictions. However, it would not be right to draw inferences about the performance of an individual judge— or, for that matter, anyone involved in bringing a case to court—based simply on whether the defendant goes on to commit further crimes. There is a risk that, if we introduced scorecards linking sentencing to reoffending outcomes, individual sentencing decisions would be criticised because the offender went on to reoffend. The sentence handed down is only one of many factors that affect reoffending.
Towards the end of his remarks, my hon. Friend used the phrase “simple and straightforward”. I must tell him that dealing with the rehabilitation of offenders—trying to act on all the levers that affect an individual, determining how easy it will be to rehabilitate him and considering all the desistance factors from crime—is far from simple and straightforward, and it does not simply involve the sentencing decision. The judiciary work in an environment where no two cases are alike and each sentence reflects individual circumstances unique to the offence, the defendant and the impact on the victim. Examining sentences in isolation from the particular circumstances of the case and the defendant’s mitigating or aggravating factors is almost certain to confuse those who were not present in the courtroom about why the final sentence was imposed. Many factors affect the effectiveness of a specific sentence in preventing reoffending. Some are unique to the individual; some are socio-economic. Given the unique nature of each case, it would be impossible for the effectiveness of sentences on reoffending to be deduced in a meaningful way. Any suggestion that such information could be provided would be misleading to the public.
My hon. Friend knows that tackling reoffending is a major priority for this Government. We are considering innovative ways to decrease reoffending rates. The Green Paper “Breaking the Cycle” set out a different approach to rehabilitation based on paying only for what works to deliver reduced levels of crime. Although I am sure that judges would welcome being informed of what happens to each defendant sentenced, if such a practice became regulated in the form that my hon. Friend suggests, it would be prohibitively expensive to administer and might well take resource away from the front line, particularly the probation service.
That said, judges and magistrates take a close interest in the outcome of the sentences that they pass and whether defendants go on to commit further offences. I suspect that, like me and no doubt you, Mr Bone, my hon. Friend welcomed the statements made by the recorder of Manchester during the recent trial of Regina v. Carter, when he was sentencing one of the earliest people to be brought to justice for the riots. In the robust terms of his sentence, the recorder made it clear in what peril people placed themselves by their outrageous behaviour in those circumstances. If my hon. Friend has had the chance to read it, he will have noted that, at the end of the judgment against one defendant in the trial, who was sentenced to oversight in the community, the recorder of Manchester reserved to himself the right to deal with breaches of that community supervision. He took the opportunity judicially to take a keen interest in how that defendant, who will be supervised by the probation service, got on.
That can happen in our system. It happens in the west London drugs court, for example, where repeat offenders who entered the system because of their addiction are brought back month by month to the same judge, as part of their sentence oversight, to see how they are getting on. It is possible within our system for judges to continue to exercise supervision of and interest in the people who come before them. Probation officers, also, often provide the courts with general information about outcomes, especially in relation to community orders, so that any judge or bench can make informed decisions about the suitability of a particular sentence for the offender before them.
In May this year, my Department published details of the relative effectiveness of different sentences in reducing reoffending. One can interpret such data in different ways, but those data showed that, after controlling for differences between offenders, those receiving community orders and suspended sentence orders have a significantly lower reoffending rate—8% and 9% lower respectively—than similar offenders who receive a short custodial sentence. My hon. Friend may say, “Indeed; then they should get a longer prison sentence rather than a short prison sentence or a community sentence”, but we must have some regard to the circumstances of the offence. He seems to be driving at the idea that first-time offenders should receive an exemplary sentence in order to get them into prison so that they can be rehabilitated. I am not sure that I am in precisely the same place as him on that matter. Overall, most people entering the justice system for the first time and receiving community sentences will have a significantly lower reoffending rate than other repeat offenders. We must find proper strategies, including prison at one level but also proper supervision between prisons, the probation service and the police, as is delivered through integrated offender management, in order to find a more effective route to desistance for such people. We are experimenting with a bunch of different pilots to see where to place the responsibility in order to deliver rehabilitation.
I think that my hon. Friend will welcome the fact that the Government also have a significant transparency agenda, which will go some way towards meeting the concerns that underlie his case. We are committed to increasing transparency in public services in order better to hold public services to account, increase trust in services through greater openness and encourage engagement between citizens and local services. The criminal justice system is no exception. Criminal cases are almost always held in public, and a great deal of information on court proceedings is already placed in the public domain.
However, we recognise that not everyone goes to their local court on a daily basis, so we are planning a significant release of individual court performance data in January that will enable local communities to find out how their local court is performing on a range of measures. The data will include, among other things, information on case timeliness in criminal and civil courts and the proportion of cracked and ineffective trials at the Crown court. That represents a significant step towards keeping the public informed of how the courts are operating in their area. When looking at the data, it will be important to bear in mind that courts’ performance is not a matter for the judiciary or court staff alone, but depends on all the elements of the criminal justice system.
Yesterday, the Justice Secretary announced his intention to legislate to remove the ban on cameras in courts. I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s welcome of that announcement. It is a cautious but important step that, taken with the data commitments, will open up the courts more widely. In addition to the data that we plan to publish on court performance, we have taken several other notable steps to provide the public with information on how the criminal justice system works locally. In October last year, we released court-level sentencing data for each court for 2009, and in May this year, we released data covering 2005 to 2010. In January this year, street-level crime information was made available to the public via the Police.uk website. It has been very popular, with 430 million hits on the site since the launch. In November, we will publish individual offender-level sentencing data by court, so that the public will be able—
Mr Peter Bone (in the Chair)
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the Minister. It has been a splendid debate.