Sentencing Bill

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

The risk of requiring Crown Courts to publish information in only some cases, but not all cases, and to expect the Crown Courts to exercise discretion, is that it could lead to public suspicion that they are suppressing data for precisely the sorts of reasons that the noble Lord articulated earlier: that it might lead to the rise in support for populist parties.

If the concern is that the publication of data showing the number of serious offences committed by people according to country of birth, nationality, ethnicity or immigration status might fuel a rise in populism, then surely the cause would be the fact that a disproportionate number of criminal offences are being committed by members of certain groups, not the fact that that information is being published. The concealment of that information and the refusal to publish it, or the concealment of some of the information, would, I fear, lead to greater public suspicion, speculation and, indeed, misinformation.

The argument made by the chief constables is that the public need to know this information if we are to avoid the kind of speculation and misinformation that fuelled the disorder in the summer of 2024. The famous Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, said the best remedy for false and misleading speech is “not enforced silence” but more and better speech. Sunlight in these cases is the best disinfectant.

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I also support Amendment 93B in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe.

It is well established that the literacy and numeracy rates for those who end up committing crime are much lower than those in the general population. A Ministry of Justice report into prison education found that 57% of adult prisoners taking initial assessments had literacy levels below those expected of an 11 year-old.

In his review, David Gauke explicitly references the use of purposeful activity in the Texan system and positive engagement with it as being linked to serving less time inside prison; yet under these reforms there is no such requirement. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has already referenced Charlie Taylor’s assessment of the current system. David Gauke also points out in his review just how much of a problem access to these services is in many of our prisons:

“His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons’ annual report for 2022-2023 found that standards of purposeful activity were rated poor or insufficiently good in all but one of the adult male prisons inspected”.


Despite the measures in the Bill, there will still be a growing prison population. This will make delivering these services even more challenging, but it has to be addressed. We need to make sure that people who are spending time in prison are spending it as constructively as they can. Focusing on this and prioritising resource to help reduce the chances of people reoffending is the best way of reducing crime over the longer term. I would argue accountability and mandatory requirements are what ultimately drive how we place resources.

[Lord Burnett of Maldon (CB)]

My Lords, I was not intending to intervene at all in this group, but could I just try to inject an element of reality into Amendment 86A, which the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, proposes? It requires the courts service to record and retain, in respect of all offenders convicted and sentenced in the Crown Court and magistrates’ court, the details that have been referred to: country of birth, nationality, ethnicity, immigration status, and the offences themselves.

It is important to remind the Committee that, in the magistrates’ courts, hundreds of thousands of minor offences are dealt with every year. For example, there are hundreds of thousands of motoring offences such as speeding, careless driving, not having insurance and matters of that sort, as well as tens or hundreds of thousands of failures to pay a TV licence. The vast majority of those cases do not trouble a court in the normal sense, in that there is no hearing in a court. They are dealt with under the single justice procedure. Almost all of them, save those that are contested, are dealt with, essentially, on the papers.

The information identified in the proposed amendment is not available at the moment, and it is difficult to see how it might be made available. I cannot, for the moment, think of a way that it could be done without exponentially increasing the burden on the system generally and imposing huge burdens on those who have been prosecuted for speeding or not having a TV licence, and so forth. Unless there were compulsion of some sort for this information to be given, nothing could sensibly happen. I do not seek to express a view on the merits of collecting such information, or at least parts of it, for some cases; that already happens, as in the Crown Court, to some extent. However, the breadth of this amendment travels into the area of unreality, I regret to say.