Sentencing White Paper

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Monday 21st September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank both noble Lords for their comments and questions. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, is absolutely right that the first duty of any Government is to protect their people, but too often, at the moment, our system of sentencing in England and Wales does not command the confidence of the public. That is why we have put forward this White Paper on sentencing.

I am not going to comment on the Lord Chancellor’s views—I think that is above my pay grade—but I can tell the noble Lord that the person who is in charge of the courts system at the moment is a Mr Kevin Sadler. I hope that helps.

The noble and learned Lord brought up the problem-solving courts. I wondered whether this would come up, because it is true that we have trialled these aspects and other approaches similar to that in England and Wales in the past. However, the full gambit of the traditional problem-solving courts’ components successfully used in other jurisdictions to improve offender behaviour and reduce the use of custody and reoffending has never been fully established in this country. There are some elements that have been integrated into previous initiatives, and evaluations were either limited in their scope or did not take place. We therefore want to pilot a full model of PSCs across various cohorts, to properly test whether they work or not in our jurisdiction. That is what the White Paper explains. It is important to know that these courts are not soft options, and they fit very well into the White Paper, which says that serious crime needs to be dealt with and that we need to know what sentences are going to be given and how long people are going to stay in prison, because that gives confidence in the system.

We also understand that we have a reoffending rate that needs to be dealt with and that, in order to do that, we need to get to people early on in their offending career—if you would like to put it like that—and to work out individually what are their issues. Is it drugs? Is it alcohol? Is it mental health? We need to know, and we need the courts to be able to provide a programme, maybe through the probation service, that will help these people early on and stop them reoffending. That is an important part of this White Paper.

To finish on the PSCs, we are not rolling them out until the courts have dealt with the backlog. It is absolutely right that there is a bit of a backlog: that was bound to happen because of Covid-19 and the ways in which we have had to change the way the courts system works.

On the resourcing issues that have been brought up, the Government has given a £155 million increase in funding this year for probation. Through the White Paper they are looking at £2.5 billion to spend on prison reforms that will also help. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, asked about prison places. It is thought, in the White Paper, we will need another 600 prison places, but there are also designs for another 10,000 places because of the extra police numbers, et cetera, and court activity. That is already in train and the money is there. I think that that was all there was from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer.

Responding to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford: once again, yes, it is about protecting people, but it also about people understanding the system and having confidence in the system. I have talked a bit about drugs, alcohol and mental health issues. In order to stop reoffending, or to stop young people in particular getting into crime in the first place, we need really good and strong systems for dealing with these issues.

I thought I had mentioned BAME and diversity of recruitment in the probation service. We want, and will have, a probation service that is world class. We will have 1,000 more probation officers who are of good quality, as we deliver the programme between now and July next year. As I think I said in an answer earlier this afternoon, we are looking at diversity when recruiting those 1,000 officers. It is going well and we are over target, particularly on recruits from the BAME community, and particularly in London.

We are looking at longer sentences, but also at something that the public have been asking for for a long time, which is to understand sentencing and, particularly, to understand why people come out earlier than they should. It is crucial, when you have sentences for serious offenders, that they spend more of their sentence behind bars. That should truly reflect the severity of their crimes, so that the public, and victims particularly, have confidence in the justice that has been served. That is why we have announced abolishing automatic halfway release for certain serious sexual and violent offenders, requiring them instead to serve two-thirds of their sentence in prison. We will also make whole-life orders the starting point for the murder of a child, which we think is important, as well as allowing judges to hand out the maximum punishment to 18 to 20 year-olds in very exceptional cases.

I will look at Hansard and make sure that, if I have not answered questions from either the noble Lord or the noble and learned Lord, I will do so in writing and put a copy in the Library.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, we now come to the 20 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. I ask that questions and answers be brief, so that I can call the maximum number of speakers. I first call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. Do we have the noble Lord? I do not think we do. I next call the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, who is not in the Chamber. Do we have him on Zoom? No, we do not seem to have the noble Lord. So I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, who is with us—good.