Sentencing Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Moylan

Report stage
Tuesday 6th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Forgive me.

I want to be brief, because the speeches have been eloquent and passionate. All the bases have been covered, but in the absence of, for example, my noble friend Lord Blunkett, whose amendments I signed, it is important that someone from the Labour Benches conveys the concern that persists in the Labour Party. That includes people who are incredibly loyal to the Government and incredibly proud of the Minister, my noble friend Lord Timpson. The anxiety and concern at this profound injustice is very live and real.

I support the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and other aspirations and amendments in this group. I agree that administrative mechanisms have not been enough. They do not show the signs of being enough to prevent more suicides and self-harm from what the noble and learned Lord put very well as having been a collective miscarriage of justice. When miscarriages of justice are perpetrated by the judiciary, there are appeal mechanisms and even executive pardon mechanisms to deal with them, but this was perpetrated by the political class: by the Executive and the legislature.

To the credit of the coalition Government, the IPP sentence was ended, but the response in relation to those already incarcerated was inadequate. These people, frankly, rot in prison. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, put it very well: some of these people have now been incarcerated—some even without any release—for offences that would never have justified life imprisonment. They are decades beyond tariff. This is unconscionable, and something must be done.

I know very well from regular meetings and from all the engagement and work that my noble friend Lord Timpson is doing that he is committed to getting these people out, if at all possible, but administrative mechanisms do not seem to be enough. I hope he will forgive me for saying that, in these meetings and in that engagement, some of us have observed even institutional intransigence in some parts of the institution about dealing with this. Frankly, this was a legislative disaster and it will require a legislative solution. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to make this 11th-hour concession. That may prove difficult— I do not know—but, at the very least, I would hope that he might consider a free-standing Bill that the Government could bring forward, with cross-party support, to provide a mechanism to deal with the remaining relatively small number of people suffering this profound injustice.

Administrative mechanisms and “wait and see” are plainly not going to work, not least because of the point about zero risk that was introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, earlier this evening and has come up in a number of speeches. There cannot be zero risk. There is not zero risk with people in the mainstream population who have never been convicted of an offence so, of course, there is not zero risk in relation to this cohort. Any risk that they pose has probably been exacerbated, as was put by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, by this appalling state-sponsored miscarriage of justice of collective proportions.

It is time for all of us to play our part on a cross-party basis, which is why I shall be listening as anxiously to the reply from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, opposite. This is a political problem and an institutional problem, and it will take good will from all sides to deal with it. We spoke earlier about the purposes of imprisonment. The legitimate purpose of imprisonment was never supposed to be political point-scoring, yet that political point-scoring has created all sorts of problems that have escalated in the past three decades, so I hope that there can be some olive branch offered from that side of the House as well.

I know that the Minister is committed to justice and has proved in his extraparliamentary life what can be done with genuine courage and a commitment to turning people’s lives around. This, I know, is on his mind. I am asking him to consider a legislative response, rather than just leaving it to administration, because that has not been sufficient. I support the approach of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, but there is a lot in what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, said too. It is perhaps a shame that we did not have a single offering, but I firmly believe that there will have to be a legislative offering, ideally from the Government. Otherwise, this stain—the word of my dear friend and former mentor, the late Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood—will carry on, perhaps beyond our own lifetimes, and I for one would be seriously ashamed of that.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, there are amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. He has asked me to say that he is mortified that he cannot be here today and that he sends his apologies to the House that he is not able to be here to move them.

I have my own amendment in this group, Amendment 78, which is carried forward from Committee. It is a very modest amendment making an administrative change that relates only to prisoners who are out on licence, to make it easier for some of them to discharge their licence. I am delighted to say that it had a reasonably good welcome in Committee from the Minister and that he has brought forward his own amendment, the government amendment in this group, which effectively does what I was proposing in my Amendment 78, so of course I have no intention of moving that and I encourage noble Lords to support the government amendment in this group.

Turning to the main question, we have the essential problem. I am not here to beat up the Government. I say straight away that there are difficult issues here for Ministers, and not just Labour Ministers. I have seen very good people as Conservative Ministers struggle with the same issues in the past, and that would be true if they were Ministers from other parties. The issues are genuinely difficult because of the question of public protection. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, complete protection of the public is not possible. The way in which we try to maximise protection for the public in these cases is through having decisions about release made by independent bodies, in particular by the Parole Board. Ministers of both parties have been very clear that nothing is going to happen, and nobody is going to be released, unless it is with the say-so of the Parole Board.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, has crafted his amendment very much with that in mind. The Parole Board follows certain procedures, and those procedures are not fixed in stone, it seems to me. The procedures, of course, are up for argument. The fact that it is the Parole Board that must decide is not up for argument, but how the Parole Board works can legitimately be up for argument.

What the noble and learned Lord has done is try to change those procedures, to change the emphasis so that the prisoner is given an incentive to engage with the Parole Board: an incentive that, if certain things are complied with within a certain period, the Parole Board will say yes, rather than the current system, where the prisoner goes through hoops and then finds out afterwards whether the Parole Board is going to say yes or no.

That is a shift in balance; it is a change merely in the way that the Parole Board works. However, just to make 100% certain that the danger to the public is not increased, the noble and learned Lord has, of course, included the measure that he mentions, whereby the Parole Board can rescind any such conditional offer if it finds that it is not working out.

It seems to me that the Ministers should be able to have an open mind about a proposal such as that, because it does not touch the red lines that they are so concerned about. It is merely a change in the way the Parole Board approaches its task, but one that has a better prospect of success.

Similar remarks could be made about the proposal from my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier. Again, the independent body in this case would be a panel of judges, or a judge operating from a panel, and again, the Secretary of State would have a final say—the Secretary of State could override it at the end—so there would be a fail-safe built in.

I think it is fair to say that either of these mechanisms would have a dramatic effect in altering the balance. While there would still be some prisoners, I frankly admit, who probably would never meet those criteria, or at least not without a great deal of work, it would start to address that residue that is finding it very difficult to move, and it would do so in a way that does not cross the Government’s red lines.

I have every sympathy with the Minister who, as other noble Lords have said, has worked extremely hard on this. We are trying to make it as easy as possible for him to be able to embrace some sort of change, while protecting public safety. I hope that he can step forward and say something positive that we could carry forward for the future. If the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, chooses to divide on this amendment, I would feel obliged to follow him into the Lobbies, but I would much rather hear it said by the Minister that he will be able to find that compromise that would allow all of us to work together in this direction.

Sentencing Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Moylan

Report stage
Tuesday 6th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I thought I had better stand up quickly, while I could still take the pleasure of agreeing with everything that has been said so far on this group—if the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, will forgive me.

I have Amendment 98 in this group, which concerns remand, but I support every sentiment that I have heard so far about the other amendments. In particular, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate, because it is important that sentencers, like legislators and the public, are constantly reminded of the seriousness of incarceration and its justifications and purposes. They are: public protection, rehabilitation, deterrence and justice for victims—not political virtue signalling, which has too often been the purpose over the last 30 years, during an arms race involving people from all sides of our political discourse. In no small part, this has led to the current crisis in our criminal justice system, let alone in the prison system. So I certainly support that.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I hope they will forgive me if, in the interests of time, I respond only to the comments made by my noble friend Lord Willetts.

First, I must congratulate him on his masterpiece of oratory whereby he implicated our noble friend the Minister in his view such that it would appear almost churlish, by the time the Minister came to respond, that he should disagree with my noble friend on almost any matter at all. I have much to learn from him in that regard.

However, I wish to turn to one point made by my noble friend Lord Willetts. It has struck me with increasing force because it builds on something said earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, and other noble Lords: that nothing will be changed by this Bill and all change will be achieved by the code of conduct. That seems to be the message; in fact, it was almost explicitly the message given by my noble friend. I have been in your Lordships’ House only a couple of years but the tendency I have seen here is to say that, where guidance of a binding character is to be issued, we should scrutinise it and set the terms for it. When it came to what the College of Policing is doing about non-crime hate incidents, it was a united view across the House that the guidance issued by the college should become statutory guidance precisely so that we could scrutinise it.

Here, however, we seem to be taking a completely reverse approach. Nothing must appear on the face of the Bill, and everything must be left to the guidance to be issued by the Office for Students. As far as I can tell—I am open to correction by noble Lords—this guidance is not to be the subject of parliamentary scrutiny nor issued through the “made affirmative” process as a statutory instrument. It is not to come to our attention in any way at all. We are simply abdicating all the guts of the Bill to the Office for Students in how it will apply. I simply say to my noble friend that I find this really rather strange. I am tempted to suggest to him that, if my amendments were reformulated not as obligations on universities but as obligations on the Office for Students to include those things in the guidance, his principled objection would fall away—or is he absolutely determined that the Office for Students should have a completely free hand, with no parliamentary scrutiny, in how this Bill will be implemented if it becomes an Act?

I raise that as a challenge to what I might call the forces of institutional conservatism, which range across the Room—those who wish to see nothing change. Are your Lordships really suggesting that change can be achieved only by abdicating our responsibilities to a relatively new public regulator?

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I congratulate the noble Lord, if I may—he congratulated his noble friend in what became an absolute tour de force of a response itself. I have huge sympathy for his general proposition that in this place we allow too much not to be in the statute book and delegate far too much to secondary legislation and even to guidance. It is often something that we do when we are giving overly broad powers and we have made a bit of a mess of the legislation—“Don’t worry, it’ll all be sorted out in guidance.” However, I have to say, in fairness—perhaps I have become part of the new forces of conservatism; that I am now considered a conservative will show you how much politics has moved to the right in this country—that there is a qualitative difference between coercive police powers and pedagogy and creating a culture of learning and inquiry in an academic establishment, which would be very hard to legislate for at the level of detail that I personally would like something such as police powers to be provided for. I have huge sympathy with the noble Lord’s general proposition that bad law leaves a lot of stuff to be dealt with later invisibly by guidance but I am not sure that the analogy with police powers and creating cultures in universities is quite comparable.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I have to say that I am sinking in sympathy on the general principle in this Committee, which is coming at me from every side. Nobody lacks sympathy with what I am saying—in general. It is only in the particular that they object to what might be put forward to practical effect—I am always open to the charge that I may have erred in drafting and may have got the wrong approach, and all that—but without substituting any particular proposal for the ones that they particularly find objectionable in my case. I agree that it is not a suitable parallel. Coercive police powers are not a suitable parallel with pedagogy—I picked it off the shelf—but they are perhaps a suitable parallel with somebody being driven out of their job because of particular views, because that too is a coercive act. If they are not defended from being driven out of their job, and we are simply saying that it will be dealt with by guidance and not in the Bill, what are we doing? They are skewered, because they now admit the need for change but they want it done by somebody else.

I now come to my noble friend the Minister, because I really must wrap up, and we have to move on.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Monday 31st October 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it sounds to me that the noble Baroness is making the case for why Article 10 is insufficient. It applies already and it is not working. She has given a number of reasons why it is not working. It has not achieved the culture shift that—I think this is common ground—we believe needs to be achieved.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Inasmuch as there is a limit to what any legislation can do without the resources and culture, clearly that is the case. This is an argument that people make against human rights all the time. My point is simply that, if you are legislating for free speech in any sector in this country, you have to make reference to the human right to free speech in this country. Our current legal regime means that that is Article 10.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

With respect, I have not made a case against human rights. The definition I propose does not impinge on or restrict Article 10; it actually gives greater freedom and greater rights. I quibble at that point, because it is quite a serious point if it is being suggested that I am trying to impinge on existing rights. I am not.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I beg the noble Lord’s pardon. I take the point, and I tried to make it clear that I know that he has a very libertarian instinct towards free speech, which I share. I tried to argue that his Amendment 28 is more restrictive than Article 10; that is a matter of the way that it has been crafted.

My general point is that if this area of complexity that we are entering is to be made even more complex and potentially incoherent by having two different definitions of freedom of speech—one for everyone in the country and in the Council of Europe, to some extent, under Article 10 and another in relation to universities only—then that is at the heart of the problem in a thoroughly problematic Bill.