Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Stern Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clinton-Davis]

I find myself in complete agreement with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. As far as this clause is concerned, the onus rests firmly with the Government. Nobody around this Chamber—Labour, Conservative, Cross-Bench or Liberal—disagrees. It is vital for the Government to prove that this clause is relevant. So far, they have not done that. There has been a chorus of disapproval surrounding this clause from all Members who have spoken, and it is virtually impossible for the Minister to be able to convince us that this clause is relevant. I will listen with bated breath, as I always do, to what he has to say, but I have dismissed it already.

[Baroness Stern]

My Lords, I shall add a few remarks to the chorus of disapproval. I welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, raising this matter. I shall say a little about the use of life sentences in our law. I have some comparative figures for 2008 about the use of life sentences per 100,000 of the general population. For England and Wales, including IPP sentences, the figure is 20.9; for life sentences that are not IPP sentences, it is 12.71. I suppose the Minister might regard those as reasonable comparators. For France, the figure is 0.85, for Germany 2.41, for the Netherlands 0.14 and for Sweden 1.68. On the face of it—and I am reasonably confident about the accuracy of the data—there is an extraordinarily different way of sentencing within the criminal law in this jurisdiction from in the jurisdictions of continental Europe.

It says nothing about sentence length—that is an entirely different question—but it says a great deal about the admiration and affection that we seem to have for indeterminacy as a way of dealing with people. In the last group of amendments, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, spoke eloquently about the impact of indeterminacy on the sentenced person. The sentenced person is left in limbo. He has a very vague idea of what the future holds and of whether a sensible plan could be made for the years that stretch ahead. He has no idea of who has the power to decide whether, and when he is released, how those decisions are made and how he can have an influence, by behaving in a certain way, on what happens in the future. I would imagine that it is a less desirable option than a fixed sentence, where it is clear to the person and to the family in the outside world what the future looks like and how it can be affected.

The proposal for another mandatory life sentence is highly undesirable and I support the amendment.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, in replying to the debate on the last group of amendments, the Minister spoke of his residual affection for the Labour Party in terms that he might have used about an elderly relative. I half expected him to cross the Floor and offer me a cup of tea and a biscuit. I appreciate his kind thoughts.

On the substance of what we are now discussing, I am not at all comfortable with the line the Government are adopting. I entirely support the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. Either the Government intend there to be an effective mandatory life sentence policy, which would be wrong in principle; or they want to give the impression of so doing when they do not intend that, which would be disreputable. I am sorry that the noble Lord appears to be lending himself to either of those approaches.

The Minister referred to the party to which I belong as being less than liberal. Those who know me within the party I represent, here and elsewhere, know that I have not been uncritical from time to time of the penal policy of the previous Administration, for what that is worth. I was going to say that the noble Lord should perhaps look behind him, but there is only one Peer from the Conservative Party in the Chamber and she has the respect of us all.

I recall a poster in the 2005 election—I cannot resist reminding noble Lords about this—which I noticed en route from Heathrow Airport into London, which said:

“What would you think if a bloke out on licence raped your daughter?”.

That was the style of an election campaign of the noble Lord’s current partners. I do not for a moment imagine that he or his colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, then or now, would approve of that approach.

One can debate the merits or otherwise of various party policies but that does not get us very far. However, the Minister talked about disarming a time bomb. The fear is that while he is disarming a time bomb he might be planting a minefield in terms of the effect of this provision about life sentences if it is carried out. Here I must plead guilty, before being charged, to inadvertently misleading the House when I gave statistics earlier, which I said related to the extended sentences. In fact, they related to the mandatory sentence provision. But they are the statistics and they demonstrate that over a decade around 5,500 would be added to the very long-term sentences if this provision should pass into law. A great proportion of them would involve serious crimes of violence against a person, as well as other offences. That was the substance of the Written Answer to the parliamentary Question to which I referred.

The noble and learned Lord has more than adequately, as one might expect, disposed of the case, such as it is, for Clause 114. I hope that the Minister today will agree that it should cease to form part of the Bill or at the very least undertake to look again at the provision and come back at Third Reading on the issue.