Sentencing White Paper

Robert Neill Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

It was all going so well, and then the right hon. Gentleman had to spoil it with an ill-judged, ill-timed and wholly inappropriate intervention. May I remind him that as a practitioner, for years I had to endure a Labour Government that passed with incontinence criminal justice Act after criminal justice Act, creating the chaos with sentencing reform that I am now having to deal with? With the greatest respect to him, I will take no lectures about a Labour Government who made automatic early release at the halfway term the norm for so many sentences. That is the wrong that we are righting now as a result of the reforms that we will introduce.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for how he has sensibly engaged with the important issues about the rehabilitation of offenders. I am particularly pleased by the warm welcome for the work we will do on neurodivergent conditions and disorders. That has been a long-standing passion and commitment of mine. Autism and ADHD are real conditions that affect thousands of people in our country. I have had personal experience in the criminal justice system of representing people with those conditions, and I think we can do better. That is why we will take action on that.

I can reassure the right hon. Gentleman about the cross-Government work on offender employment. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who is deeply committed to increasing the number of offenders in work. We are working on plans and a cross-Government strategy. The committee is chaired by the Prime Minister, which exemplifies the Government’s deep and fundamental dedication to this bold agenda.

I welcome the other comments that the right hon. Gentleman has made, and it is in that spirit of constructive engagement that I am sure we will work together to make sense of criminal justice after years of failure, mainly by the Government of which he was a member.

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I warmly congratulate the Lord Chancellor on an excellent and very well-balanced statement, which shows his own experience as a practitioner in these matters. A number of the themes that the White Paper addresses are ones that the Justice Select Committee has picked up on a number of occasions. I look forward to progress being made on those. I particularly welcome the recognition that protection of the public and rehabilitation of those who can be rehabilitated are not mutually exclusive. However, will he also use the opportunity of the White Paper to engender a wider debate across society as a whole about the purpose of sentencing, and the purposes of imprisonment and community sentences, to give both the public and sentencers greater confidence in the suite of measures available and create a broader-based, better-informed understanding of the complexities of the tasks that people in the justice system grapple with day to day?

[Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Justice Committee. We all know his long and deep knowledge of the system as a practitioner. He is right to remind us of the purposes of sentencing. He will see in the White Paper a lot of reference to public protection issues—protecting the public from harm, but also protecting the public from crime. The two go together, and one is served, I would submit, by effective prison sentences, while the second is served by rehabilitation through the community options that can make such a difference with the right support.