Sentencing Bill [HL]

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 25th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak about consolidation rather than the detail of sentencing, although I am glad that this project is reaching a conclusion.

Sentencing is a discrete and most serious matter. The fact that the law surrounding it was so amended and reamended that even the most senior lawyers in the land had difficulty knowing what it was with accuracy surely had to be addressed. With 1,500 pages of sentencing law spread across many instruments, the Law Commission said that sentencing lacked transparency due to complexity; regrettably, that is the state of many of our laws.

For some subjects, 1,500 pages is short. When we started scrutinising Brexit regulations, the Financial Services and Markets Act had far more pages than that. The Treasury admitted that it could not send us an up-to-date copy as it did not have one and did not know everything that was in it. When researching my response to the corporate governance Green Paper in 2016, I asked the Library for a print of the up-to-date Companies Act 2006. It used a commercial site as the GOV.UK pages were not up to date, then telephoned to ask if I could accommodate a pallet-load of paper in my office. Both those Acts contain criminal offences and neither is all that old, in the scale of things.

With Brexit, we have hundreds more multiple, nested regulations. As we have trade talks and decisions about equivalence of laws, can we be sure that we know what our laws are? Can anyone else be sure? The EU always mistrusted how we had complied, and Brexit transpositions have exposed various mistakes and left-out bits. It has taken five years for the sentencing consolidation to get to this final stage. With that overhead, I am beginning to understand why every statutory instrument says that the Government have no plans to consolidate law—but is that really a satisfactory answer?

Finally, I welcome the updating provisions and the table of origins, but when I was looking for things in my usual subject areas, I did not find listed all the abbreviations for legislation that were used in the subsequent table. For example, abbreviations for the Financial Services Act, the Bank of England and financial services regulations, the Secretaries of State for BEIS order or the crime and courts commencement order did not show when I searched the table.