Sentencing Bill

Debate between Robert Jenrick and John Hayes

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Lady perhaps does not remember the last years of the last Labour Government. They let out 80,000 criminals on to our streets. That is how they emptied the prisons—not by building more, but by opening the doors. We did not do that.

There is a better way. Another way is possible. A third of all those in our prisons are either foreign national offenders or individuals on remand. The first answer to this challenge is to get the foreign national offenders out of our prisons and out of our country. The number of foreign prisoners in our prisons has gone up under Labour. The second answer is to fix the remand problem by getting the courts sitting around the clock to get the court backlog down. What has happened to the court backlog? It has gone up. If the hon. Lady is looking for someone to blame, she should look no further than those on her Front Bench.

Behind the many thousands of criminals who will walk free because of this Bill are thousands of victims, and each has a harrowing story. Daniel Tweed launched a vicious attack on his partner in their home in Northampton. He punched her multiple times. He dragged her by her hair. He kicked her and stamped on her. She was subsequently taken to hospital. He was sentenced to 12 months. [Interruption.] Someone said that is not enough, and I agree. Most people in this country would say that is not enough. That disgusting man should be in jail for far longer, but under the Bill, violent domestic abusers like Daniel will walk free. I say to Members, “Be under no illusions about what you are voting for this evening: Daniel Tweed and men like him will walk free.” There is no specific domestic abuse carve-out from the presumption against short sentences. That is what we are voting on tonight.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The truth that dare not speak its name, at least on the other side of the Chamber, is that the public know what many on this side know too: that many more people should be imprisoned for much, much longer. Successive Governments have failed to grasp that nettle, because they have given in to what the Justice Secretary, who, by the way, is a personal friend of mine—[Interruption.] He is desperate to avoid that description. They have given in to what the Justice Secretary amplified today, namely the foolish idea that crime is an illness to be treated rather than a malevolent choice to be punished. We need a retributive justice system that recognises what the public recognise: that people like the thug whom my right hon. Friend described need to be punished, and punished severely.

[Robert Jenrick]

I could not agree more with my right hon. Friend. The truth is this: most people in this country are already raging at the fact that prisoners get let out of prison early. They were sick of that happening under the last Government, and what are this Government doing in response? They are letting out more, and they are asking them to serve even shorter sentences. That is not justice. That is not what the people of this country want.

Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill

Debate between Robert Jenrick and John Hayes

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Let me make some progress.

Eventually the Sentencing Council did U-turn, but not before the guidance had briefly come into force. The council took until midday on 1 April, which was several hours after the guidance had come into force, to update magistrates and judges. Its email undermined the Lord Chancellor yet again. It stated that it still believed that the guidance was “necessary and appropriate”. The whole saga has been nothing short of farcical. It has been an embarrassment. It has damaged public confidence in the justice system, and the Justice Secretary’s Bill does not fix that trust deficit. It is half-baked. It is a half-job that stores up problems for another day—because, make no mistake, we will be back here again and again; it will be like Groundhog Day. The Justice Secretary has left in post at the Sentencing Council the very people who drafted these rules and declined her initial invitation to change them. She has left the system intact, and she has left the door wide open for this to happen again. That is not hypothetical. We know for a fact that more offensive two-tier sentencing guidelines are incoming.

The Sentencing Council is consulting on new immigration guidelines that water down sentences for people smugglers. If they come into force, hundreds of immigration offenders a year will not meet the 12-month threshold for automatic deportation, blowing a hole in border controls. If the Justice Secretary wanted to stop that—there are plenty of open-border activists who would oppose her—this Bill leaves her powerless to do so. She has chosen to be powerless. It is the definition of madness to repeat the same decisions and expect different results. History will keep repeating itself until Ministers take back control of sentencing frameworks. But still the Justice Secretary stands at the Dispatch Box and claims that there will be no two-tier justice under her leadership.

The Bill fixes one small element of the problem and leaves the rest of it entirely intact. It does nothing to stop the two-tier pre-sentence report guidance, which still instructs probation officers to take into account so-called intergenerational trauma—trauma suffered not by the defendant, but presumably by their ancestors. It does nothing to stop the bail guidance issued by the Ministry of Justice, which instructs officials to “prioritise” ethnic minority defendants for bail decisions—not on the facts of the offence, not on the basis of risk to the public, but because of their racial or cultural identity. It does nothing to stop the “Equal Treatment Bench Book”, the official handbook for judges, which is riddled with activist talking points, including the claim that migrants are mistreated by the press, and the adoption of a dangerously expansive definition of Islamophobia that could amount to a back-door blasphemy law.

Everywhere we look—more examples emerge every week—this ideology runs through the Ministry of Justice like rot through the rafters. The principle of equality before the law, one of the great inheritances of our country, is being systematically inverted, replaced by cultural relativism, by a hierarchy of victimhood. Some defendants are to be treated gently; others are to face the full force of the law—all depending on their background, race, religion or self-declared identity. That is not justice. It is injustice, wrapped in the language of compassion. But who is it compassionate to? The victims? Of course not; they do not get a look in.

[Sir John Hayes]

My right hon. Friend deserves great credit for championing the cause of justice and obliging the Government to follow suit, albeit grudgingly. Leaving aside the fundamental injustice that he describes—the two-tier justice system—does he acknowledge that what the Sentencing Council proposes and continues to do undermines popular faith in the rule of law and justice and, as the Lord Chancellor herself says, tears the whole system apart?

[Robert Jenrick]

That is the very real risk of what we see, not just in these aborted sentencing guidelines, but in the broader fabric of two-tier justice that we are revealing with every passing day. What we all want to see, and what I believe the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) wants to see as well, is equality before the law. That means that in no instance should the law be applied differently depending on the colour of people’s skin or the faith that they abide by. We must all fight against that, because it is immensely corrosive to public trust and confidence in the criminal justice system.