Sentencing Bill

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

It is a product, I suppose, of living in an age infected with contagious liberalism that people in this place and elsewhere spend a lot of time speaking about freedom. I care about freedom too. I care about freedom from disorder and about freedom from the fear and actuality of crime. I think it was Burke who said:

“The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected to order”.

Disordered society is most terrible for those who live on the frontline of crime: those who have to cope with disorder; those who do not live the gated lives of the bourgeois liberal elite.

I approach the Bill with that in mind. Are the repercussions of the Bill likely to lead to a more ordered society, likely to protect people who might otherwise become victims of crime? There is much to welcome. The first part of the Bill deals with serious crime and the sentences it attracts. I am pleased by the further development of longer sentences for people who do terrible, wicked things. There is a caveat, because as you will know, Mr Deputy Speaker, the Home Secretary has always had the power to intervene personally and become involved where he or she believes that a sentence needs to be reviewed or extended, and has done so on a number of occasions to make sure that someone who might otherwise be released stays in prison. Will the Minister say whether that power will be curtailed or affected by the measures in the Bill? Will the Home Secretary still be able to intervene on those rare occasions on which they feel it is right to do so?

That is the best bit of the Bill—the part that deals with those serious crimes in the way I have described. Much of the rest of the Bill is lamentable. I am not going to vote against Second Reading because I think it provides an opportunity for further scrutiny and consideration. However, I am disturbed by the idea of turning all sentences of 12 months or less into suspended sentences. That is not quite what the Bill does, but it is its essence.

Let me explain why. Criminal justice has three primary purposes. The first is retributive. Let us be clear about that—the first principle of criminal justice is to punish people for a harm that they have done. That might be a terribly unfashionable thing to say, but it is what the majority of people in South Holland and The Deepings think, as well as the majority of people in Witham, Grimsby and even Bromley and Chislehurst. I will return to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill)—for I know Bromley and Chislehurst rather well, as I suspect he knows.

If that is the first purpose of criminal justice, does the Bill aid that purpose? To answer that question we have to consider this: is it more of a punishment to lose your liberty—to be incarcerated—or more of a punishment not to? Is it more of a punishment to be deprived of the opportunity to do all the things that you choose to do, or is it more of a punishment not to be? I have to say that in my view—and it is not just my view; it has been the view of almost every society in every civilisation over all of time—the principal way of punishing people is to incarcerate them, to deprive them of their ability to behave in the way they want, freely and openly.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful point with which I substantially agree, but does he accept that with the rise of technology, there are many different ways of depriving people of their liberty? If we can come up with ways of depriving them of their liberty that also make it less likely that they will reoffend at the end of their sentences, does that not serve a dual purpose, being both the absolutely right moral judgment as a punishment and a way of reducing the number of future victims who will subsequently need to be served by the criminal justice system?

[Sir John Hayes]

That is a plausible argument, except that having a tag on your ankle is not a deprivation of liberty in quite the same way as being in prison. Being able to go on eating fast food, watching telly and doing all the other things that you might do at home is not quite as much of a deprivation, is it?

Moreover, we have heard this so often before. It is true that technology has moved on and the tags are of a rather different kind, thanks to the work that was referred to earlier, but when tags were first introduced we were told that the technology was such—these things were so secure—that no one would be able to evade their application or use, only to find that all that was wanting. My hon. Friend will therefore forgive me for a certain degree of scepticism—not cynicism. I am cynical about nothing. However, I am sceptical about this.

The second principle of criminal justice is to provide respite for those who have been victims of crime, and others who might be, by taking people off the streets. That is to put the victims and others out of harm’s way by removing the harm—literally taking the harm beyond their purview—which is what prison does. It may be that if these tags work perfectly—if these people are constrained in the way suggested by the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend—I suppose the victims may be protected anyway; but I suspect that people in my constituency and elsewhere who have been victims of some of the crimes concerned would say, “I want these people to be as far away from me as possible, and as far away as possible from my children, my home and my community. I do not want to know these people or see them daily, because they have done harm witnessed by those who live in my locality.”

The third principle of criminal justice is that once you have caught someone, convicted them and sentenced them, you might take steps to prevent them from committing crime again. Of course I understand that. There has been a long-standing debate between those on the retributionist side of the argument, like me, and those on the rehabilitationist side of the argument, like my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, who believe that crime is essentially an ill to be treated, and that the circumstances of the criminal—those were my hon. Friend’s words—are more important than the event of the crime.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

I will try to be brief, and will pass quickly over clause 1 of the Bill, other than to welcome it. It delivers on our manifesto commitment to have tough sentences for the most serious crimes. Also, it finally delivers on the contract that was struck with the British people back in 1965—when capital punishment was repealed, the quid pro quo was life imprisonment. That, however, has never been the case—life imprisonment for serious murder—so the whole life order delivers on that original contract. I welcome the clause for that reason alone.

I move on to clause 6, which much of this interesting debate has been about. It is absolutely right to say that there is a balance of competing forces. The criminal justice system has to balance punishment with the reduction of reoffending. I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) that there is a moral perspective to punishment: society expects that people who commit crimes will receive punishment and wants them to see the physical consequences of crime. My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) is right, too, that when a perpetrator is behind bars, a community experiences physical relief, and that is a common good. But—and it is a big “but”—those benefits have to be balanced with systems that lead to a reduction in future reoffending.

Although we have been arguing a little about the details behind the evidence, the overwhelming weight of the evidence that I have seen is that short-term prison sentences do not lead to reductions in reoffending—in fact, quite the opposite. Although there are benefits to prison sentences, and I have named a couple, there are costs as well. One is that we perhaps turn a small-scale offender into a much more detailed offender because they will meet and mix with the wrong kind of people, and lose their jobs, homes and relationships—all the binding elements of community membership. When they come out, they are statistically more likely to reoffend. That is a cost of prison, and we should not shy away from that. We should recognise it.

I have looked up the data about the effectiveness of sentencing options on reoffending from the Sentencing Council, an arm’s length organisation, which says:

“The evidence strongly suggests that short custodial sentences under twelve months are less effective than other disposals at reducing re-offending. There is little evidence demonstrating any significant benefits of such sentences. Indeed, there is a reasonable body of evidence to suggest short custodial sentences can make negative outcomes (such as reoffending) worse.”

[James Daly]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Jerome Mayhew]

I will not. I am so sorry, but I have only a couple of minutes.

The quote gets to the nub of the matter. I am a deductive reasoner; my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings, who is no longer in his place, says that he is an inductive reasoner. Just because someone is an inductive reasoner does not mean that they no longer look at the data. We need to do both. It is because I have been looking at the data that I support the Bill.