Sentencing Bill [HL]

Lord Adonis Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 25th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I cannot think of anybody in the House less fitted to impersonate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. However, it is my duty to make some remarks. The consensus in favour of the Bill is admirable. It is extremely weighty in terms of the judicial expertise of the House, and therefore I have no hesitation whatever in supporting it. As the Minister said, the law must be accessible and under- standable, and if it is felt not to be sufficiently accessible and understandable by people who have practised the law, that alone is a justification for the Bill.

On the alarming point about the high number of sentences which higher courts find to have been illegal, it is not absolutely clear to me from reading that piece of work how far that is to do with the law being inaccessible and how far it is to do with the misapplication of the law. It looks as if a large proportion of those cases, if not almost all of them, would have occurred even under this legislation. However, it may be that having everything codified in one place will improve things; it is very hard to argue against that principle, and I do not seek to do so.

However, I regard the Bill as a serious wasted opportunity. While the lack of accessibility and codification of sentencing law might be an issue, and I accept that therefore this Bill should proceed, by far the bigger issue in respect of sentencing is the positive content of sentencing law itself, which to my mind is not fit for purpose. We have seen the prison population in Britain treble in the last 40 years—it is now by far the largest in Europe, per capita as well as absolutely. However, longer prison terms, almost all for non-violent offenders, have neither made Britain safer nor reduced crime or the fear of crime. They also stand in very stark and striking contrast to most of the rest of Europe, which has much smaller prison populations, much shorter prison terms, and much more effective alternatives to custodial sentences. It seems that the Bill essentially fiddles while the big issue is unaddressed. We should be seeking to review, modernise and learn from best practice in other civilised countries on the content of sentencing legislation; how it is actually written in the law books is a very secondary consideration.

When we last debated the Bill—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said, this is déjà vu all over again—I found myself in striking agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Bates, from the Conservative Benches, on this issue. He made an impassioned speech about the evils of over-long sentences and creating a culture in prisons which is, frankly, deplorable and probably also against the European Convention on Human Rights. The conclusion that we both reached is that the huge judicial expertise which this House contains might be well utilised in a Select Committee to look not just at the codification of sentencing law but at its actual content. Because we are not, I am glad to say, a populist House, we would be capable of bringing our expertise to bear on this issue and we might then get a genuinely worthwhile reform, which would correct the move towards ever-longer sentences and an ever-larger prison population, and in consequence towards what I regard as a much less civilised society.