Sentencing Bill

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, at the beginning of this second day in Committee, in which we have covered Amendments 51 and 52 and now this one, the noble Lord, Lord Foster, said that we can talk about doing all of this but it will all depend on whether there are resources to deliver real change.

In Yorkshire, I went to visit a pig farmer. He was very successful and the chair of governors of the local comprehensive school, where Ofsted was making a lot of demands, particularly about the testing of children. Everybody was into testing and examination, but the resources to deliver what was required were lacking. He said to me, “Come, and I will show you my pigs”. So we went to the farm and saw the pigs. He said, “Do you see them? Those are going to be sold in about six weeks’ time. What matters is not that every day I weigh the pigs to see whether they have arrived at the right weight. To fatten the pigs is not constantly to weigh them but to feed them”. That is what actually fattened the pigs, not the constant weighing. Transparency is important, but let us be very careful that we do not overburden the Probation Service by throwing at it a lot of things it needs to do and that we need to know whether it is doing them. What that did to the teachers, at the beginning of Ofsted, was to make them scapegoats to be blamed for a lack of proper resources and lack of constant training of teachers to be better teachers.

I hope that the Secretary of State will not be given so many burdens in things he has to produce before Parliament every year that our eye is taken off how we turn our Prison Service into a place where people really are rehabilitated, where those who want to learn are taught, and where reoffending begins to drop. We have to pay attention to that. I know that accountability and transparency are interesting, but we can become so obsessed that, in the end, people are given more and more burdens and take their eye off the job they are supposed to be doing. I urge a bit of caution, particularly about the Parole Board and what we mean by accountability and how we are going to get there.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that certain things need not all hang out. There are certain things which require confidentiality, and, if we are not careful, we will begin to distrust the entire criminal justice system, because the public will feel unsafe and feel that more should be put in. We are all very keen on it, but how much volunteering time have we ourselves given to helping prisoners and the Prison Service, so that they begin to deliver better?

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, I will address briefly Amendment 58A in the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee and my name. The amendment addresses the need for a report on the availability of activities and treatments for probation requirements. It goes hand in hand with Amendment 139B, in my name, which proposes reporting the levels of reoffending by offenders who have completed both custodial and community sentences.