Sentencing (Pre-Consolidation Amendments) Bill

Rob Butler Excerpts

3rd reading & Committee stage & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 4th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)]

I concur with the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). This is an uncontroversial Bill that has support right across the House, and as such, I do not wish to detain the Committee for long. However, I want to return to a subject raised by my colleagues on Second Reading, and I would be grateful if the Minister could respond today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) raised the shocking statistic mentioned in the Library briefing that 36% of 262 cases sampled by the Law Commission involved unlawful sentences. This has potential serious repercussions for the administration of justice in our courts. One suggestion made by my hon. Friend was for the Government to publish a list of common mistakes made, to draw to the attention of the judiciary. The Minister said he would investigate that idea, so could he update us on his investigation or any work being done to draw up that idea?

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

I should state at the outset that, before coming to this place, I was a magistrate for 12 years and consequently sentenced a large number of offenders. For some 18 months, I was the magistrate member of the Sentencing Council. While there, I was party to briefings by the Law Commission on the proposed sentencing code that is indirectly the subject of today’s legislation.

The sentencing code is greatly to be welcomed, and thus so is this legislation. It must be right that sentencing law is as clear and straightforward as possible, in the interests of justice for all parties in a case, including, naturally, not only the offender being sentenced, but the victim of the crime, for whom clarity and certainty can be a comfort. It follows that it must be right to take the necessary steps towards achieving that aim by amending existing legislation to facilitate the enactment and operation of the proposed sentencing code. The clean sweep approach covered in clause 1 is a significant step that will help avoid errors and appeals resulting from historic or redundant aspects of legislation being incorrectly reflected in a sentencing exercise. I welcome the improvement that that will bring to initial sentencing decisions and am reassured that the concomitant safeguards against retroactivity will protect human rights.

Although the details of other clauses of this Bill may not seem to merit great discussion in and of themselves, they do form part of a significant and important process to improve a vital element of the criminal justice system. In the interests of brevity, I will reserve any other remarks for Third Reading. However, I ask the Minister to do all he can to ensure that the magistracy is properly trained once these provisions come into place, along with the sentencing code, to ensure that they are able to apply to all correctly and appropriately.

[Chris Philp]

Let me start by also welcoming the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) to his place on the Opposition Front Bench. Like him, I am looking forward to many exchanges in the coming weeks and months as we debate the volume of legislation coming through and other matters connected to our courts system. He mentioned the issue of the case load before the courts. Of course, the outstanding case load before the Crown court prior to coronavirus was significantly lower than it has been in the past, particularly in the 2000s, but we want to get it down even further. Naturally, coronavirus is causing a number of challenges in the courts, but he will know that we are reintroducing jury trials. That commenced on 18 May and they are now operating in seven courts. We intend to expand that as quickly as we safely can; we hope that a number of courts that have been closed will reopen as soon as they are safely able to do so. He will also be aware that we are expediting the roll-out of the cloud video platform, which will allow many, many hearings to take place on the platform which otherwise, owing to social distancing, would not be possible. This probably is not the time to rehearse everything in detail, but let me reassure him that a huge amount of work is being undertaken by the Ministry of Justice and by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service to make sure that our courts system functions in the way that we want and that we avoid the accumulation of large backlogs as a result of the coronavirus epidemic.

The hon. Gentleman asked particular questions on the timing of the Sentencing Bill enacting the sentencing code. As I said, we are hoping to bring that forward in this House as soon as we can. I regret to say that I cannot give him a precise time, as it is still subject to agreement by business managers, but we want to bring it forward as quickly as we can. We will also make sure that regardless of the sequencing between that Sentencing Bill and the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill, they technically fit together. I was glad to hear him, in essence, welcoming the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill, which we will be discussing shortly; I hope it is one of those topics where we can approach it across the House in a bi-partisan spirit of co-operation. Matters touching on national security and protecting the public from terrorism are topics where, in general, we are able to work together, and I very much hope that will apply to that Bill as well.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee, echoed my thanks to Professor David Ormerod, which I wholeheartedly endorse and repeat. I wish to give my hon. Friend the assurance he requested that the approach he laid out here in terms of clarity, consistency and consolidation is a principle that we would wish to apply in the future.

It is no good doing the consolidation exercise once and simply having a snapshot. We want it to be, as he put it, a living instrument that will be applied into the future so that the consistency and clarity that the Bill and the sentencing code will bring are not frozen in time but rolled forward and applied in the future too. I can therefore give him the assurance that he asked for.

The hon. Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) raised a question following up an intervention, which I recall, from her colleague the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) on Second Reading, which happened in a Committee Room a few weeks ago. I think I said that publishing guidelines on common errors that might be avoided was a matter probably best handled by the Judicial College, or possibly the Judicial Office. I will follow up again with them to check in on progress in that area.

In a similar spirit, my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler), who is of course extremely experienced in this area, as he mentioned, drew attention to the importance of training. Again, once the sentencing code is enacted, the Ministry of Justice will work with the Judicial Office, the Judicial College and of course the Magistrates Leadership Executive to ensure that the training measures are in place so that the judiciary who are using the code are able to do so to best effect.

I thank Members who contributed to the debate for their very constructive and thoughtful comments. Again, I commend clauses 1 to 5 to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 1 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 2 to 5 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Schedules 1 and 2 agreed to.

The Deputy Speaker resumed the Chair.

Bill reported, without amendment.

Third Reading

--- Later in debate ---

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

In the interests of full transparency, I repeat my declaration from Committee stage: I have been a magistrate, and therefore have sentenced a large number of offenders, and I have been a member of the Sentencing Council.

I warmly welcome the Bill and in particular the clean sweep that will facilitate the enactment and operation of the sentencing code, which in turn will make the process of sentencing more straightforward and coherent. It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied. Hopefully, this Bill will lead to far less delay because there will be far fewer errors to correct, and that must be right for all participants in the criminal justice system.

It is my hope that this Bill and the sentencing code Bill that will follow will help progress towards wider changes in sentencing policy and practice in the months and years ahead. The place that I would wish to see as the starting point for every part of the criminal justice system is the perspective of the victim, and I rather suspect that we can all agree on that across the House. To that end, we should not forget that there are five purposes of sentencing—punishment, rehabilitation, reduction of crime, protection of the public and, importantly, reparation by offenders to the victims of crime. I believe there is scope for judges and magistrates to be more explicit about how their sentences address those five purposes, and not least how they will protect the public and have a positive impact for victims.

There also needs to be far greater clarity about how long offenders will actually spend in prison, and there is scope to alter the way that is announced in court at the moment of sentencing too. The public should always understand what has happened in court and the amount of time that will ultimately be served behind bars.

Of course, that is not to say that I believe in locking people up and throwing away the key—very far from it. I am a firm believer in rehabilitation, and I declare my former role as a non-executive director of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. Excellent work is carried out both inside prisons and in the community in order to address the causes of offending and, crucially, to reduce the likelihood of further crimes being committed. Indeed, I believe there is scope for considerable innovation in sentencing disposals, not least through the effective use of technology.

All of this should, I believe, be carried out with a much greater sense of the impact on the victim of the offence committed. The passing of the appropriate sentence is therefore crucial. The need to decide on that sentence correctly, based on the right legislation and procedure, is a consequent fundamental requirement in this legislation to facilitate greater clarity and efficiency. Therefore, the Bill is a welcome step in that process and a far better service of justice.