Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Slaughter]

You don’t even know; not a clue.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order.

[Stephen Phillips]

I am grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker. I did not really want to get into the legal aid aspects of the Bill. I have expressed my concerns and I am sure that Front Benchers are listening to them. I am concerned that the Opposition have at least not spelled out any detail as to where they would make the cuts that they accept have to be made to the legal aid budget.

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[Anna Soubry]

Will my hon. Friend please understand this? When someone is subject to an IPP, they have no knowledge about when they will be released. Does he know that they can be released only when they are deemed no longer to be a risk to society? A relatively small number of people have been released and we can assume that they were released only because they were no longer deemed a risk to society. The reason for that is that they have been on the sort of courses that other people on IPPs have not had the benefit of. The lack of courses is the real problem.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. May I ask for shorter interventions, because many Members wish to speak and I want to try to get everyone in?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right that people are released only when it is safe to release them. My constituents think that it is rather a good thing that people are released from prison only when it is safe to let the out. I am all for that, unlike the Lord Chancellor.

The reason why the Lord Chancellor is not bothered about reoffending and indeterminate sentences is that he is not interested in reoffending at all. What then is his priority? It is the same as it has always been: simply reducing the number of criminals in prison. That is highlighted in the Bill’s explanatory notes, which state:

“The overall impact of the sentencing proposals will result in annual savings of approximately £80m in 2014/15, due to a reduction in the demand for prison places of 2,650”.

I invite all my hon. Friends to look back at what they promised their constituents at the general election in their personal manifestos and at what they said against their opponents at the hustings. Which of those who will vote for the Bill tonight said at the hustings that they were standing on a platform of reducing the number of criminals sent to prison by 2,650? I suspect that none of us said that, and I invite my hon. Friends to consider that when they decide how to vote tonight.

I am also concerned about the widely reported mandatory six-month sentence for thugs who use knives to threaten people. As I have already shown, this is a solution looking for a problem, because the sentencing guidelines already insist that such cases are sent to Crown court for a first offence because it is deemed that magistrates do not have sufficient sentencing powers.

It gets worse. On threatening with knives, clause 113 states:

“It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove good reason or lawful authority for having the article with him or her in the place…concerned.”

That is a reasonable defence for possession of a knife, but how is it a reasonable defence for using a knife threateningly just to be able to explain why one has the knife in the first place? Either that is a drafting error or it is complete nonsense. Perhaps the Minister will enlighten us in his reply.

The provision is not mandatory anyway, because it is later stated that people do not have to be sent to prison if there are particular circumstances that relate to the offence or the offender that would make it unjust to send them there. So much for it being mandatory. It is a joke.

Clauses 56 and 57 are further examples of the Lord Chancellor’s aim of sending fewer people to prison. Clause 56(2)(a) removes the duty of the court to impose more onerous conditions once someone breaches a community order, or to resentence them to custody. It says that the court “may” do so instead of saying that it “must”, as currently applies.

Clause 56(2)(b) allows the court to impose a fine as a punishment for breaching a community order. That provision did not exist before. Clause 57 increases the length of sentence that can be suspended from a maximum of 51 weeks to two years and removes the need to attach any community requirements at all. If a criminal has committed an offence that deserves a custodial sentence of up to two years in prison, that is what they should get: a two-year sentence in prison. Furthermore, if someone is given a suspended sentence with no requirements, they will effectively not be punished at all.

As I said a couple of weeks ago, breaches of suspended sentences can now result in a fine, thanks to clause 58. Anybody who breaches their existing get-out-of-jail-free suspended sentence should go to one place only: immediate custody. Is it any wonder that the British public have no faith in sentencing? The criminal justice system can be effective only if the public have confidence in it.

The Bill also fails to extend a magistrate’s power of sentencing to up to 12 months, yet that was a firm manifesto commitment. Not only are we not implementing what was already in the law, we are repealing that part of the law in this Bill. We have already heard at length how schedule 10 removes the ability of the courts to remand somebody in custody, to try to make it harder for people to be remanded in custody so that they are instead granted bail. In the previous Parliament, the last Labour Government introduced the mechanism that time spent on bail on a tag could be knocked off a prison sentence in the same way as time spent on remand is knocked off a prison sentence. We were apoplectic with rage about that, and my hon. and learned Friend the current Solicitor-General said when we were in opposition that this proposal

“will cause a great deal of scepticism, undermine public confidence in the justice system and make the Government look increasingly ridiculous if the court is then required to say, ‘By the way, all the time that you have spent at home in bed is time that can be taken away from your custodial sentence.’”—[Official Report, 9 January 2008; Vol. 470, c. 369.]

I could not agree more. The only difference is that I still believe that this is wrong, whereas my Front-Bench colleagues have gone from thinking it was utterly ridiculous to formalising the policy as part of the Bill. Of course, the other measure to which we were wholly opposed in the previous Parliament was the automatic release of people halfway through their prison sentence, and that, too, is formalised in this Bill.

The British public are losing faith in the criminal justice system. One only has to look at the Populus polling carried out by Lord Ashcroft that showed that 80% of the public—80% of victims of crime, 80% of police officers—think that sentences for convicted offenders are already too lenient. When asked how they expected the new coalition Government would compare on crime with the last Labour Government, more than 50% of those polled said they expected them to be tougher. When asked their views a year after the coalition Government came to office, only 13% thought the Government had been tougher, whereas 23% thought they were less tough. That perception is a disaster for the Conservative brand, and this Bill will only further weaken our position.

All the above shows that this Bill is not the rehabilitation revolution or the reduced reoffending revolution we were promised; rather, it is a release revolution that will simply catapult more criminals out on to the streets to commit more crimes. I do not know if the Lord Chancellor is trying to break the world record for the number of manifesto pledges broken in one Bill, but if he is, he has made a good fist of it.

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[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Just before I bring the next speaker in, I am going to reduce the time limit to six minutes. We still have 20 speakers to come, and I do want to get everybody in, so anybody who can shave a little time off that will be gratefully welcomed.

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[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I welcome the Bill’s focus on making the criminal justice system more victim oriented. In the few minutes allowed, I shall focus my contribution on what more can be done in the Bill to help to prosecute and punish offenders for the crime of child sexual exploitation.

Despite being a mother of three children, I was unaware that horrendous crimes were being perpetrated in my community—crimes of online grooming, and the sexual abuse and rape of children. Like most of my constituents, as the news broke of the prosecution of Michael Williams last year, I found it difficult to believe that such crimes were possible in this century and this country, and especially in the community where I grew up.

A few months later, the further revelation of six men operating a paedophile ring in my part of Cornwall—it was uncovered and prosecuted by Devon and Cornwall police’s Operation Lakeland—forced me to find out more about the horrendous crimes that those men perpetrated against children as young as five years old. I am impressed by the determination to tackle and prevent that and to raise awareness shown by the Home Secretary, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who has responsibility for children, and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), who has responsibility for crime prevention. However, they need some help from their colleagues in the Ministry of Justice in two respects. First, the Ministry of Justice could improve support for young witnesses who give evidence in criminal proceedings, and secondly, it could improve sentencing policy.

As with all crimes, to secure successful prosecutions witnesses must be prepared to come forward, give evidence and be cross-examined in court. Unless witnesses, their families and carers believe that they will be supported and fairly treated when they go to court, they will not come forward. I am grateful to Sheila Taylor of Safe and Sound Derby who has given me information on cases that vividly illustrate why the current system must change.

The first case concerns a 15-year-old girl who was repeatedly sexually abused. She was forced to give evidence in court for eight days, and she was cross-examined by a team of nine defence lawyers, including, on one occasion, by five in a row, working as a team to try to undermine her evidence. Although the court showed respect for the defendant’s human rights, there was no understanding of how the crimes perpetrated against the victim had left her a vulnerable and terrified witness. She was physically sick every day before she came to court and became so traumatised by the experience that she ran away from home during the case. Sadly, the case was dropped. The second case concerns a girl who, when shown into the witness box, found that the screens promised to her to prevent her from having to see the people who had abused her had been forgotten. Seeing the men who had sexually abused her, she understandably became hysterical. As such, she was deemed unfit to give evidence, and again the case was dropped.

I want to improve the experience and cross-examination of children in our courts. I am fully aware that the Ministry of Justice has prioritised this concern with the recent publication of “Achieving Best Evidence in Criminal Proceedings: Guidance on Interviewing Victims and Witnesses, and Using Special Measures”. However, there is still an issue about how to get legal practitioners to use it. The majority of cases that go to trial at the Crown court have first to go through a plea and case management hearing. According to Crown Prosecution Service guidance, a PCMH is compulsory only where the child is a defendant but not a victim. That should be changed.

Such a hearing should be compulsory for both a child defendant and complainant, because the PCMH, which is purely an administrative hearing at which outstanding issues of law or procedure are dealt with by the judge before trial or evidence commencement, provides the judge with an opportunity to give a direction to all counsel that they should abide by the Ministry’s own “Best Evidence” publication when dealing with young witnesses, be they defendants or complainants. If such judicial direction was made compulsory at the PCMH, lawyers could not say that they had no knowledge of such information or that their approach was the norm in practice.

Furthermore, some judges need to be made aware of this issue and be encouraged to intervene when questioning methods are inappropriate. Publishing guidance for judges in the criminal procedures rules would greatly improve good practice. I believe that the Government really want to make our criminal justice system more victim-orientated. What better place to start than with the children and young people who are the victims of the most horrendous of crimes? What better way to convince them and society as a whole that we consider these crimes to be totally unacceptable than by ensuring that perpetrators serve long sentences, including life sentences—sentences designed to ensure that they will not be released until they have demonstrated that they have effectively controlled their sexual urges and can resist reoffending.

For the victims, the combination of the crimes perpetrated against them, even when the disclosure and subsequent support is excellent, and the experience of giving evidence in court can give them a lifelong sentence of suffering. Is this fair? Surely, the life sentence should go to the perpetrator not the victim. I urge the Government, therefore, while the Bill passes through the House—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The hon. Lady’s time is up.

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[Heidi Alexander]

In that case, I will give way.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman has only just come into the Chamber.

[Robert Halfon]

I beg your pardon, Mr Deputy Speaker.

Is the hon. Lady aware that knives are often sold on the internet priced with British pound signs and does she agree that action needs to be taken to combat that?

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. I have three Members to get in, but only 14 minutes left.