Oral Answers to Questions

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Attorney General.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

May I first warmly welcome the Solicitor General to her place, and the Attorney General to his place in the other place, in what the Solicitor General will already know is one of the most interesting and challenging parts of government? While I am at it, I should of course also welcome the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) as the new Chair of the Justice Committee. May I also take the opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa), the shadow Solicitor General, on the responsibilities he will shortly take up on behalf of the whole House, which he will do brilliantly after an all-too-short career on the Opposition Front Bench?

I do not know for how long the Solicitor General and I will have these exchanges over the Dispatch Boxes, but I am glad to be able to start on a note of consensus. I agree with her that it would not be appropriate to extend the unduly lenient sentence scheme to cover unduly severe sentences, for which, as she says, appeal is already available, but she will agree that the scheme is always capable of improvement. It is currently wholly reactive, responding to requests from others for sentences to be reviewed. May I ask the Solicitor General to consider the merits of her Department, and indeed the Ministry of Justice—I see that the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the hon. Member for Swindon South (Heidi Alexander), is sitting beside her—monitoring sentencing more proactively, in particular for newly created offences, so that we can all have confidence that, particularly in relation to those offences, sentences are being passed within anticipated ranges?

[The Solicitor General]

I thank the right hon. and learned Member for his question, and also for his warm welcome. He is enormously experienced in these matters, as both a former Attorney General and a former Justice Minister. As he rightly notes, newly created offences, such as those created by the Online Safety Act 2023, do not currently fall within the scope of the unduly lenient sentencing scheme, and I understand that there are no immediate plans to extend the scheme further, but—again, as he rightly notes—we always look for opportunities to reform, and, along with my Department, I will keep that under review.