Sentencing Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

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

[Lord Balfe (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I would like to make three points. First, we have heard it reflected many times in this debate that, in the survey, 36% of the sentences were found to be unlawful. What has not been said, unless I have missed it, is how many of that 36% were under-sentenced and how many over-sentenced; in other words, how many people should have been let out, and how many were not given the right sentence and should have been there for longer? But the question that arises, for me, is: what about the rest? Will there be a review of all the sentences to see whether people have been sentenced correctly? If not, will it be open to prisoners to have their own sentences reviewed? The figure of 36% is very high. We cannot just pass on and say, “It will all be all right when we get this new Bill on the statute book.” People will still be in prison. So, my first question to the Minister is: will all sentences now be reviewed in the light of the discovery of this sample?

My second point is that any future changes in sentencing must be made by changing the terms of the Sentencing Code, and not in a new document. If it becomes a new document, the whole thing will start to fall to pieces. I would like the agreement of the Minister to the effect that this will be the template for the future, and there will not be new sentences added on.

The third thing to which I draw the House’s attention is that, as we all know, whenever anything goes wrong there is a great tendency to reach for a press release and demand a tougher sentence. I noticed that, when the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was quite disgracefully daubed, instead of the correct response—saying that prosecution should be made under the law as it exists, because it was an offence—there was an immediate call for a minimum 10-year sentence for defacing a statue. Frankly, that is quite ridiculous and out of proportion. I ask that we are careful not to carry on passing sentences for offences that already exist. There is a tendency to say that we will have a sentence for this or that, without acknowledging that the matters under consideration are already offences.

As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and a couple of others have mentioned, we have a huge and growing prison population. When I was first in the European Parliament, Turkey was well ahead of Great Britain in the number of people that it had in prison. At the end of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, there were 40,000 people in British prisons—slightly fewer than in Turkish prisons. Today, the total is projected to grow to 85,800 by 2022 and is still heading up. I am told that the 100,000 mark will be reached around 2030.

I am not against prison sentences. In any society you need prisons and to sentence people to prison, but you also need to make prisons places that people do not want to go back to. I suspect that, in many cases, people are so hopelessly damaged when they come out of prison that they drift back into reoffending. I acknowledge that this is not part of this Bill, but in the context of our criminal justice system we need to look at a proper way of building rehabilitation and retraining into our system.