Sentencing (Pre-consolidation Amendments) Bill [HL] (Law Commission Bill)

Lord Adonis Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Tuesday 11th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to join in congratulating the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett. She made what has been, in my time in the House, the briefest but most authoritative maiden speech. I can see why she has such an impressive record as a judge. We are extremely fortunate to have her in the House for the future.

Clearly, the arguments for this Bill are overwhelming. They have been made by the Minister, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and all other noble Lords who have spoken. We look to the Minister to facilitate the passage of this Bill so that we can get on with the substantive Bill. It says something about the complexities that we are dealing with that it takes a prior Bill to get to the consolidation Bill to bring about the reforms that we want. This further demonstrates the need for these pieces of legislation. My noble and learned friend Lord Falconer said that in a sample of sentences, 36% were found to be unlawful, which is truly shocking. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, said, for a nation that prides itself and exhibits itself to the world in respect of the rule of law and setting high standards, that is not acceptable.

I hesitated to speak, because these points are agreed among us, and because this is a debate dominated by very experienced judges and lawyers. However, fortified by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, who took us into courts martial in the 18th century, and the noble Lord, Lord Bates, who talked about the wider principles of sentences and outcomes, I will make a few wider remarks. To the lay person coming into this field, the fundamental issue is not the operation of the law—although clearly that needs to be improved—but the outcomes. To anybody looking at this from the outside, the fact that in the last 40 years the prison population has doubled, the average length of sentences has significantly increased, and concern about crime and recidivism has not improved in society, proves that we are out of step. I hesitate to say it in this company, but Scandinavia and other countries have lessons to teach us on how to manage crime in society. We are way out of step with those societies in the numbers that we incarcerate and the lengths of sentences. The question must be asked—and if not in this debate, there needs to be an appropriate time—what are we going to do about it? Are we going to let this continue?

I look at most of the things we did when I was a member of the same Government as my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer with great pride. In most areas of public policy, we left things better at the end than at the start, but I do not look back with any pride at the fact that we had a larger prison population at the end of our time than the beginning, nor that we had a criminal justice system that evidently was not working better. My noble friend recited a long list of statutes which have been passed, making the point that the law on sentencing has changed virtually annually in the last 30 years. What struck me as I listened to the debate and read the material relevant to it was that very few of those statutes have taken a wide-ranging and comprehensive view of sentencing. All of them, except perhaps the Criminal Justice Act 2003, have been incremental reforms to sentencing, in response to issues of public concern and often not dealt with in the best context. They have not been properly co-ordinated and have added to the complexity of the statute book, which the noble and learned Baroness referred to. They have all had the effect of ratcheting up, bit by bit, the prison population and the length of sentences.

The question I wish to put into the debate—I came here partly to form views as to how we might tackle the problem—is: how are we going to address this wider issue? The noble Lord, Lord Bates, did it by reference to wider moral principles, which I fully respect, and he referred to Michael Gove’s speech. However, we are legislators—we should obviously be guided by moral principles but we also need to have regard to how we can change the law—and we need an opportunity to get to grips with the issue of sentencing and its relationship to crime and public confidence in a comprehensive way. I am not sure how we can do it—clearly, this Bill is not the appropriate vehicle—but we need a process which gives a comprehensive view of sentencing at large.

I thought I had an answer as I listened to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, referring to the committee he chairs. That committee is not directly relevant to this issue but it prompted the thought in my mind that, as we are currently looking for new subjects for Select Committees of the House—ad hoc committees—to examine, it would be fit and proper for the issue of sentencing at large to be examined comprehensively by a Select Committee of this House. Perhaps the noble and learned Baroness, in the new duties she is going to undertake in this House, could play a prominent part in that, given that she has more experience in this field than anyone.

We have a duty to society at large to undertake this exercise at some point. It may be that doing it in parallel with the sentencing code being put on a statutory basis in the legislation that follows this would be an opportunity to do so. There is certainly no body in Parliament or the country that is more fit to undertake this exercise. I put the thought to the Minister and other noble and noble and learned Lords that the time has come for us to seek to address what should happen to sentencing policy and to give our advice to Parliament and the public at large.

The facts are stark: we have a prison population that has doubled, we are seriously out of step with international opinion and best practice, and the prison estate is in a scandalous state. Given the reports of the prison inspectorate that come forward month after month, if any other field of public service—I have significant experience of education but one could look at any of the others—was addressing reports of this kind, we would close down those institutions immediately. Obviously, we cannot close down prisons because we have to have places where we can incarcerate criminals. However, the time may have come when we need to take a comprehensive view of this issue and a Select Committee of this House might be the way to take it forward.