Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 25th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern. He put this with beautiful simplicity and total clarity. He underlined the fact that, at the end of the day, we are answerable for what we decide. I deplore bringing in important things at the late stage of a Bill, which is why I withheld my vote when we were voting and not debating last week, because it made a mockery of Parliament. This is not making a mockery of Parliament; it is underlining the humanity of Parliament. I believe we should follow the sage advice of my noble and learned friend.

[Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise and feel rather guilty about the fact that I have neglected this Bill during its passage through the House because I was simply unable to attend and I decided not to participate. I came to listen to this debate to find out what was being put on the statute book, having followed it a little from a distance. This issue therefore took me completely by surprise. I have listened to the exchanges, but I thought I should add the voice of a third former Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice to the very eloquent case that has been made on both sides by the two others who share that position.

Personally, I do not approve very much of mandatory sentences, which have spread on to the statute book far too frequently in recent years in response to dramatic and publicised cases. I do accept the mandatory life sentence for murder; that is a very long-standing practice. We should deal with considerable care when we add new mandatory sentences in response to understandably emotional and dramatic cases that appear in the media but, unfortunately, responding to the media has become a feature of criminal justice Bills rather too frequently.

I rose simply to do what my noble friend Lord Cormack did: to add my voice, in so far as it helps at all, to those that have been put forward. This House would be letting itself down if it just let this go through by overstrict adherence to the normal procedures, which of course we should normally follow.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I appreciate that Third Reading is not the time for long and ponderous speeches, but I wanted to place on record—as someone who tabled amendments on Report and in Committee to deal with IPPs and the injustice that remains—that I wholeheartedly support the remarks of the noble and learned Lords, Lord Brown and Lord Judge, my noble friend Lord Moylan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Burt.

This is just the beginning and must be seen as something that will continue to be looked at, both by the Select Committee in the other place and the Ministry of Justice. I also place on record my personal thanks to my noble friend the Minister, who has dealt with this question with sensitivity and within the bounds of possibility that being a Minister in this House places on him. I thank him for what he has done and look forward to hearing more that will undo the injustice that the IPP regime is still visiting on a number of people.

[Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)]

My Lords, I feel very guilty that I was unable to arrange my diary to take any part in the Bill as it went through because this is the part of the Bill in which I would otherwise have taken an active part. I have already apologised to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, outside this House for the fact that in the end I was not able to offer him any assistance.

I add only, as my noble and learned friend just has, my support and simply record that I was the Lord Chancellor who abolished indeterminate sentences in 2011 with the wholehearted support of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who was then in the House of Commons with me and defused any attempts to preserve this stain on the statute book, which he had accidentally introduced without any expectation that it would be used as it was and resolve into a problem.

If you had told me when we abolished this sentence that there would be thousands of people in the position that they are now, 11 years after abolition, because they were left over to be dealt with, I would not have believed it. What I proposed was simply a change to the burden of proof that the Parole Board had to apply when deciding whether it was safe to release somebody, but that was never implemented. The fact that all these years later we face these problems is something of a disgrace. I thank the Minister for making this modest move, but I certainly agree with what everybody has said about the modesty of it. It needs urgently to be addressed by the Select Committee in the other place.

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, I too would like to echo the thanks for the Minister. He has, in a sense, been a lobbyist within the Ministry of Justice to get this modest amendment over the line. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, summed up the position very well when he described it as the first crack in the wall. I was alarmed by the figures he quoted from his Written Question, where he seemed to indicate that there would be more prisoners in jail because of recalls, so the problem is likely to get worse and not better.

The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, referred to the Minister’s reference to Newton’s second law—that it is easier to move an object that is already in motion. My first degree was in physics, and I would phrase that slightly differently, in a way that is relevant to the politics: the rate of change of movement is proportional to the impressed force. We on this side are certainly interested in increasing the impressed force on this object which is currently under way.