Unduly Lenient Sentences

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Sir Mike Penning]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. I congratulate him on the work he has done to address the law in this area. If we work together across the House, we can address what he wanted his Bill to do with regard to other anomalies. When we talk about the juvenile courts, we think about really young people, but I could have been prosecuted in a juvenile court—had I committed an offence—while I was serving in the Army, which I joined when I was 16. It seems to me that we are removing a whole plethora of cases—with victims who still desperately need to feel that they have been heard and listened to—simply because they were tried in a certain type of court or involved a certain type of offence.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for securing the debate. He has mentioned his time as a Transport Minister. I completely agree that one should do everything one can to support victims, but at the same time one should prevent people from becoming victims in the first place. Does he agree that, in certain circumstances—such as sentencing for driving while disqualified or drink-driving, for which only a six-month custodial sentence can be given by the lower courts—we need not only that review of unduly lenient sentences, but a review of sentencing in the wider context, including for such transport matters?

[Sir Mike Penning]

Absolutely. Colleagues across the House will bring up such anomalies during this debate. I am enormously proud of the very few drug-related driving offences that were prosecuted—I had the honour of being the Transport Minister when we introduced the drugalyser at the roadside—as well as of the first prosecutions that took place, although that took nearly four years and I was in the Ministry of Justice by then. But the sentencing also needs to be a deterrent. People need to realise that when they commit certain offences, the penalty will fit the crime. If people go before magistrates courts—I think this is what my hon. Friend was talking about—knowing that they will get only six months, they will not opt for trial by jury or to go up through the system to be tried before a judge in the Crown Court. I agree—though this is not something I will concentrate on today—that we need a much wider debate on the types of sentencing to which I am referring.

Before I became a Minister, I did try—I appealed against the leniency of sentences, particularly those to do with paedophiles. I had real concern about some of the sentences for paedophiles who not only did not plead guilty, but did not think that they had done anything wrong, and I have always had concerns about racially aggravated offences. I think such offences are an abhorrence to our society.

I appealed successfully. One of my constituents was murdered by a man called McLoughlin, who was out of prison on day release. He attacked my constituent’s neighbour and my constituent did what I hope I would do, which was defend their neighbour, but they were murdered. McLoughlin was found guilty in the courts and given a sentence of something like 20 years—don’t quote me on that. We all knew what would happen—it would be three years or something. Nor was that the first offence, because he had murdered before. I appealed to the then Labour Attorney General that the sentence was unduly lenient. He should have got a much more severe sentence, or at the very least an indeterminate one.

In court the judge had said, “I cannot give an indeterminate sentence, because the European courts will strike it down.” That was like a red rag to a bull. The sentence a judge in our courts gives has nothing to do with a European court. We subsequently won the appeal—the Attorney General agreed with me, as did, eventually, the Court of Appeal. McLoughlin was eventually given the right sentence, which was an indeterminate one. Hopefully, he will spend the rest of his life in prison. That will never bring back my constituents’ husband and father, but the original sentence was wrong.

When I got into being a Minister, in particular for policing in the Ministry of Justice, I kept asking: why are we not addressing those anomalies in the law? It is fundamentally unfair that victims do not have the same rights as the perpetrators. The Ministry of Justice is not represented in the Chamber today, but I know that the briefing would be that the cost implications of having more people in our prisons are disproportionate.

I am afraid that that is tosh. I have seen no physical evidence for that—not in the whole two and a half years I was in the Department, and I asked for it several times. The Attorney General and I debated it around the ministerial table and with the Prime Minister, who was then the Home Secretary. We never got to the bottom of the great opposition in the Ministry of Justice to more people going to appeal. In actual fact, from the other end of the telescope it looks like fewer people go to appeal because they do not all opt to go to the Crown Court, opting instead for their defence to be heard by their peers in a magistrates court. There is no evidence and we do not know exactly what is going on.