Debate Excerpts: Julie Hilling vs Jeremy Wright

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Julie Hilling and Jeremy Wright

Monday 12th May 2014

(10 years, 8 months ago)

Commons Chamber

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Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)

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Does the Minister not accept that magistrates are not told why people have already cited exceptional circumstances? The magistrate has no idea what previous plea of exceptional circumstance was given. My amendment is about that issue, so that magistrates are made aware.

Jeremy Wright

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The hon. Lady has just made a wider point than would apply simply to the single justice procedure. The point we are addressing in relation to her amendment is that there should be no significant disadvantage for those who are dealt with under the single justice procedure; nor should there be any disadvantage to the court under that procedure in ascertaining the facts of the case. If someone were wanting to assert particular hardship, which might exclude the possibility of disqualification, they would need to come to court and do it themselves. The court should then do the necessary investigations. However, I take her point and will consider carefully whether there are improvements that we can make to more general procedures.

Amendment 9 is also related to the single justice procedure. It would introduce a new requirement that the documents sent to the defendant with the single justice procedure notice should include a submission from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to the court informing the court of any penalty points on the defendant’s driver record. I agree that up-to-date DVLA information is important when deciding the sentence for such offences. The House is aware that that very issue was raised in Committee, and as the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara), made clear, our intention then was to consider the point further.

Under the existing procedure, when dealing with an offender in their absence, courts are able to check the DVLA position when sentencing for certain road traffic offences—we have discussed that point and, as I said, I accept that it is important that they are able to do the same under the new procedure. We need to ensure that the legislation allows for that in cases dealt with under the new single justice procedure as well. As I said, we have undertaken to look at the matter, and it is still under consideration. We will ensure the necessary consideration. On that basis, I hope that the hon. Member for Bolton West and her colleague the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane), whom I do not see here, will be satisfied.

New clause 10 makes an amendment to schedule 21 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which provides guidance to the courts in assessing the seriousness of all cases of murder in order to determine the appropriate minimum term to be imposed under the mandatory life sentence. The amendment would raise the starting point for offenders aged 21 and over from 30 years to a whole life order for the murder of a police or prison officer in the course of his or her duty.

I do not need to remind the House of the vital role that those officers play every day in keeping our communities safe and in managing difficult and dangerous offenders. Tragically, some officers have paid the ultimate price while carrying out these duties on our behalf. The Government consider it essential that those officers feel the full weight of the state behind them in the execution of their duties. Changing the starting point to a whole life order for those who murder police and prison officers will send a powerful message of support for the work that those vital public servants do. It will show that we place the highest value on their safety and that we recognise the dangerous job they perform on a daily basis.

Those officers can be distinguished from other public servants by the role they perform in terms of routine contact with dangerous offenders. Their daily duties and risks mean that they stand apart from others. That unique and important status should be recognised, and those who murder police or prison officers on duty should know that they face the most severe sentence possible under the law. I should make it clear that the change in the law does not necessarily mean that a whole life order will be imposed in every case involving the murder of a police or prison officer in the course of duty. The court must always have the discretion to impose the appropriate sentence based on all the facts of each case, but offenders should be in no doubt that they face the severest consequences for such murders. I therefore hope that the House will support the new clause.

Finally, new clause 11 is designed to close a gap in the sentencing power of criminal courts that could prevent an adequate sentence being imposed where it turns out that the offending is more serious than it appeared when the case was initially accepted by the youth court. We believe the gap might tend to undermine efforts to encourage youth courts to try grave crimes in suitable cases and might restrict sentencing powers unduly. The category of offences that includes cases such as those that involve allegations of serious sexual offending against under-18s, for example—also known as grave crimes—are serious enough to be capable of being sent to the Crown court for trial, but not all of them necessarily require the highest sentencing powers of the Crown court. It might be possible to deal with some of them satisfactorily using sentencing options available in the youth court, and if so there is an advantage in retaining them in the youth court. The youth court is particularly attuned to inquiries into the alleged activities of children, and serious sexual offences can be tried there by authorised district judges who have been specially trained to deal with them.

A defendant under 18 charged with such an offence is invited to indicate a plea, and when a guilty plea is indicated the youth court may commit him or her to the Crown court for sentence where appropriate. On the other hand, if the indication is not guilty and the youth court decides to retain the case and tries and convicts the defendant, there is no general power to commit the offender to the Crown court for sentence. That means that if information emerges during the trial that suggests that a more severe sentence is appropriate, the youth court will simply have to make do with its own sentencing powers. The only exception is when the conditions for imposing an extended determinate sentence are met, but they are stringent. That is at odds with the position for adults, where there is a general power to commit cases to the Crown court for sentence, not merely after a guilty plea.

It is possible that the absence of a safety net allowing for committal for sentence leads youth courts to be unnecessarily cautious in deciding whether to retain grave sexual crimes. A provision permitting committal to the Crown court for sentence whenever a defendant is convicted of a grave crime in the youth court, as is already possible after a guilty plea indication, might encourage the youth court to retain more cases and ensure adequate sentencing powers are available in every case. I hope that the House will therefore support new clause 11.

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Jeremy Wright

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As I have tried to indicate to the hon. Gentleman, I would want to look at all those things. He is right—I do not know. We have to look at the matter carefully and I am sure he would want us to do that. Between the point at which he decided to table new clause 22 and this debate taking place, there has not been an opportunity to do that work, which we would want to do. He is welcome to continue looking a gift horse in the mouth if he so wishes, but what I am saying to him, I hope very clearly, is that we are certainly not shutting the door on what he is proposing, but neither are we going to accept it today without doing the proper work. No responsible Government could do otherwise. He may or may not want to be part of a responsible Government, and if it is not a responsible Government, he may want to do things differently, but that is the way we do things for as long as we are in government.

Let me move on to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood. Again, he spoke movingly, as he has before, of justice for Ross and Clare Simons. He also made the case for including in the review the issues of death by dangerous driving by those who are disqualified, and we will certainly consider that matter also.

The hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) made, as she has done before, a good case in relation to those who have multiple points on their licence and are somehow not yet disqualified. She is right to be concerned about that, as are we. We would want to consider that matter, too, at greater length. There is, as she knows and as I have said to her before, an issue in relation to how much we can sensibly trespass on judicial discretion. In each and every case a bench of magistrates would have to have concluded that the exceptional hardship case was made out, such that they thought it appropriate not to disqualify in those cases. There will always be exceptional cases, but her argument is that those cases should, indeed, be exceptional; they should not be regular, and I have a good deal of sympathy for that view. The specific point around exceptional hardship claims—

Julie Hilling

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Does the Minister therefore think that perhaps a stronger direction should be given to magistrates on what should be exceptional hardship?

Jeremy Wright

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I would be wary of doing that, but we can look at how we ensure that magistrates are doing all necessary due diligence on the nature of past exceptional hardship claims, perhaps before other benches. That was the hon. Lady’s second point that I was just coming on to. There is something in that. We need to consider how to ensure that benches take the opportunity to look carefully at what has been said to their brethren in other cases involving the same defendant, who may be running the same argument on exceptional hardship multiple times and continually avoiding disqualification. We will need to look carefully at that.

That does not mean that running the same argument cannot necessarily amount to exceptional hardship more than once—again, that is a matter for each bench to determine—but they should do so, as she says, with their eyes open and in possession of all the relevant facts. We will look at whether there are ways in which we can ensure that they do more to get those facts. However, it is not the case that they do not have access to those facts now. The DVLA already retains the information on whether an exceptional hardship claim has been made by the same defendant in a previous case. It is there to be looked at, but further inquiries may then be necessary to find out exactly what was said in the making of that exceptional hardship claim. We will take that away and look at it. As I have already said, there is a good case for including in the review the hon. Lady’s point about multiple points on a licence and the totting-up offences.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) made a number of points around the vulnerability of cyclists, with which, of course, I agree. We must always be conscious of that, not just in the Ministry of Justice but in other Departments too, as I know colleagues in the Department for Transport in particular are. He is right to say that this is not simply about sanctions, but also about changing behaviour. He will recognise that in the Ministry of Justice we are pretty much all about sanctions, so there is a limited amount that can be done by this Department, but certainly in conjunction with other Departments there may be a great deal more that can be done. He will understand, too, that the review will be into the penalties available to the judiciary under the criminal law. It will not, of course, sensibly be able to reach wider than that, although he will wish to take advantage of his opportunities to make submissions to it none the less.

My hon. Friend will recognise that new clause 10 deals with the starting point for decisions on the appropriate tariff for a life sentence. We think it appropriate for the reasons that I set out earlier that the starting point for murders of police officers and prison officers should be a whole life tariff, but sentencing judges can move up or down from that starting point as they think fit, and that applies in both directions. If one starts with the murder of a police officer and believes for particular reasons that it is appropriate to go below a whole life tariff, the sentencing judge can do that, and will want to set out why they choose to do that. I anticipate, following this change, that that will be very much the exception, and that as a matter of course, those who are sentenced for murder of a police or prison officer in the performance of their duties should expect to receive a whole life tariff. That is the purpose of this change. But the reason I say that it operates in both directions is that if somebody were to be convicted of murder, not necessarily of a police or prison officer attracting a whole life tariff starting point but a lower starting point, that may still result in a whole life tariff if the judge thought it appropriate to revise that sentence upwards from the starting point. I hope that is helpful to my hon. Friend. With those remarks, again I invite the House to support the Government new clauses, and not the Opposition’s new clause.

Question put and agreed to.

New clause 14 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 22

Penalty for driving while disqualified

‘(1) In Part 1 of Schedule 2 to the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 (prosecution and punishment of offences under the Traffic Acts) in the entry relating to the offence of obtaining licence, or driving, while disqualified, section 103(1)(b) of the Road Traffic Act 1988—

(a) in column 3 leave out “6 months” and insert “12 months”;

(b) in column 2 below “(c) On indictment, in Scotland”, insert “(d) On indictment, in England and Wales”; and

(c) in column 3 below “(c) 12 months or a fine or both” insert “(d) 2 years or a fine or both”.

(2) In relation to an offence committed before section 154(1) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 comes into force, the reference to 12 months is to be read as reference to six months.

(3) The amendment made by this section applies only in relation to an offence committed on or after the day on which it comes into force.’.

Makes the offence of driving while disqualified triable either way, with a maximum penalty of 2 years’ imprisonment for conviction on indictment.—(Mr Slaughter.)

Brought up, and read the First time.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

All 3 Debates between Julie Hilling and Jeremy Wright

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Oral Answers to Questions

Oral Answers to Questions