Unduly Lenient Sentences

Peter Heaton-Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) on securing this debate. I echo what he said about the importance of the victim being at the centre: victims and their families should absolutely be front and centre.

It is completely right that it is open to victims and their families, and to the general public, to make complaints about undue leniency to the Attorney General. However, as my right hon. Friend said—he hit the nail on the head—the current system is less clear than it should be, if I may use that phrase, and the threshold for referral seems pretty high.

Let me use a specific case from my constituency, in which there are no ongoing legal proceedings, to illustrate that. Tragically, Aiden Platt, a young constituent of mine in North Devon, was killed when his motorbike was hit by a driver under the influence of drugs. Aiden was just 20 years old. That hit the family and the community of North Devon extremely hard. The driver, a woman called Laura Ward, had cannabis, diazepam and amphetamines in her system when she hit Aiden. At the subsequent court case, she admitted causing death by careless driving while under the influence of drugs. Between the crash and the court case, a further factor arose: Laura Ward became pregnant and had a baby. The judge at Exeter Crown court gave her a 20-month suspended sentence. He specifically said that the reason for that suspension was:

“Your son is five months old and I am…persuaded for that reason and that reason alone I can properly suspend this sentence.”

I have met Aiden’s mother, Mandy, on a number of occasions and she knew that I would raise this case today. I have also been contacted by friends and members of the local community. Frankly, they all express astonishment at this case. For them, not unreasonably, justice has not been done. Yet when Mandy sought a referral by the Attorney General on the ground of undue leniency, she was advised that the case was not within the scope of the current scheme. Aiden’s family think that that is wrong, and I agree: it sets the threshold too high. The other point that they make, after suffering the trauma of the loss of their young son and then the trauma of reliving it all during the subsequent court case, is that 28 days is actually a pretty short period in which to, as Mandy put it to me, “get your head together” and get around to making a formal referral to the Attorney General. That time period ought to be extended.

For those reasons, I ask the Solicitor General not just to give consideration to what offences are within the scope of the unduly lenient sentencing rules, but to consider widening the Attorney General’s ability to refer cases where the offence is already within the scope of the rules but the “gross error” threshold for referral seems to set a pretty high bar. My constituents would take great confidence from knowing that those matters were being reviewed. They believe that the sentence that the woman who killed their son received sends out the wrong message. I hope that, in reviewing the rules for unduly lenient sentencing—I welcome the fact that that is being done—we can put that right, and I very much look forward to the Solicitor General’s comments.