Independent Sentencing Review

Calum Miller Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising issues relating to the Probation Service. We have already expanded the number of staff. Last year, we recruited 1,000 extra, and this year we are on track to hit our target of 1,300 extra staff. Increasing resource—first and foremost with more staff—is a clear priority for us. We are investing in technology to help the Probation Service to be more productive. We have already funded programmes and pilots on AI tech designed to decrease the amount of file work that probation officers have to do to allow them to have more time to do the things that only a human can do: to spend time with the offender in front of them, to come up with a proper plan to reduce their reoffending and therefore to keep the public safe.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

I very much welcome the Lord Chancellor’s statement, and I know that victims and survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence in my constituency will do so as well. I thank her and her ministerial colleagues for their cross-party working, including with my hon. Friends the Members for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) and for Twickenham (Munira Wilson).

On the domestic abuse recommendations and the application of domestic abuse at sentencing, will the Lord Chancellor consider whether it is possible to tag those offences retrospectively, as well as at sentencing? Also, I welcome her remarks about transcripts and transparency. In the light of the pilot on transcripts for sexual violence and rape cases, will she consider including in that pilot the entire transcript, not just the transcript of sentencing?

[Shabana Mahmood]

On tagging retrospectively, I will certainly go away and have a look at that point. I suspect, although I do not want to mislead the hon. Member or the House, that a retrospective trawl of all cases—including common assault, which is where we see most domestic abuse cases land for a charge and a criminal case—may be beyond where we can get with the data available to us and the time it would take. However, going forward we will try to capture exactly those cases—not only domestic abuse-connected offences, but other offences such as common assault, which we know have taken place in a domestic abuse context—so that they are all flagged and proper data is kept.

On transcripts, sentencing remarks are currently available for other victims, such as in murder cases and so on, and that will be extended to victims of rape and serious sexual violence. To repeat a point I made earlier, I believe in a transparent justice system. I would like to be in the position of using AI technology to make not just sentencing remarks available. We are thinking about making broadly what happens in courts and such transcripts more widely available. What inhibits us is cost, and we are trying to take out that cost by looking at AI models, but we cannot proceed with anything unless we are absolutely certain about its accuracy because, as I am sure the hon. Member appreciates, a document purporting to be a record of what was said in court needs to be bang on.