Sentencing Council Guidelines

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Liz Saville Roberts

Tuesday 1st April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

Who can say? I suggest asking any of the Conservative Members here whether they have an answer to that, but they appear to still wish to live on another planet and never reckon with their own track record in government.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Black people in Wales were the most over-represented ethnic group in prison in 2023, followed by those from a mixed background and people belonging to an Asian ethnic group. That over-representation is worse in Wales than in England. Pre-sentencing reports can help us to understand why people of black and minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to be sent to prison. Even if she disagrees with the method, surely the Secretary of State agrees that action is necessary to tackle evidenced inequality within the criminal justice system, so what solutions is she bringing forward?

[Shabana Mahmood]

The proper role of a pre-sentence report is to give a judge who is about to pass down a sentence vital information about the context of that offender—for example, whether there has been domestic abuse, their age and other vital factors relevant to the offending behaviour—so that the judge can make a decision about the best sentence to pass. The pre-sentence report is not about setting right any other wrongs that exist, however legitimate they are—that is not the point of the pre-sentence report—but about giving the sentencer in every single individual case the information that they need, such as whether a woman is pregnant or has recently given birth, as the Court of Appeal upheld recently. Those circumstances should be properly understood by judges. The position in law is that a pre-sentence report should be sought by judges in all cases, unless the court considers it unnecessary to do so. That covers the majority of cases where a pre-sentence report should be sought, but we should not confuse the proper role of what the pre-sentence report is there to do.

To the extent that there are over-representations, I see them too. Over 70% of my constituents are non-white and, as the right hon. Lady can see, I am from an ethnic minority background myself, and I am also from a faith minority. I see those disparities—they are a lived reality of my own life—but I am not prepared to sacrifice the principle of equality before the law to put those disparities right. I wish to be more curious than anybody else has been in previous years about what lies behind those disparities, and about what are the proper levers that have to be pulled to put them right. We often discuss judicial diversity, but I am not sure that increases in diversity have necessarily led to a change in what the underlying data shows. Clearly, there is more going on. Any solutions that politicians come up with have to be tested in the House, because they are properly the domain of policy and Parliament.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Liz Saville Roberts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

14. What steps her Department is taking to support incarcerated pregnant women and mothers.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Shabana Mahmood)]

We are sending too many women to prison, two thirds of whom are non-violent and over half of whom have dependent children, and 75% of the time the child leaves home after the mother is incarcerated. That is why we have launched the women’s justice board, which will set out its strategy in the spring. Its goal is to reduce the number of women in prison and, ultimately, the number of women’s prisons.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

All Welsh women in prison are held in England, and being far from home adds to the emotional torture of separation from children, but we cannot assess the extent of the separation without public access to Wales-specific disaggregated data. Will the Secretary of State commit to making this information public so that we can ensure that pregnant women and mothers and children have the proper support they need?

[Shabana Mahmood]

The data on how we track the experiences of women across England and Wales will be work that the women’s justice board—once it is up and running—will be able to look into and make recommendations on, which we will pick up in the spring.

Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Liz Saville Roberts

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I can assure my hon. Friend that my ministerial team and I have been working closely with our colleagues, primarily in the Home Office, but also across Government. Support for victims sits in different Departments, but we are making sure that we have a “one team” approach to this important matter. I have sought to pull the levers at my disposal in such a way that we gave the Probation Service the time it needed to prepare for the SDS40 changes. I did that because I wanted to ensure that our obligations under the victim notification scheme could be met. I am monitoring progress on that regularly, and I will ensure that any improvements required are made on a continual basis. We keep this under constant review.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Neil Foden is in prison for the sexual abuse of four vulnerable schoolchildren. He was the headteacher and strategic headteacher at two secondary schools in Gwynedd. Foden was convicted of 19 charges and sentenced to 17 years in July this year for his abhorrent crimes. The judge said he showed no remorse. Can the Lord Chancellor advise me how to seek assurance for his victims that Foden will not be released until he has served at least two thirds of his sentence?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I can confirm that all sex offences of all types are excluded from the SDS40 measures.

Prison Capacity

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Liz Saville Roberts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I welcome my hon. Friend to her place. This change is designed in part to allow probation to do the job that it would normally do when it comes to prisoner releases on licence. We will have an eight-week implementation period; that is one of the big differences between this scheme and the previous Government’s end-of-custody supervised licensing scheme, which was pretty chaotic and opaque. Things moved very quickly, not allowing probation the time to do its job. I am not going to pretend that the eight weeks is ideal, but it is better than where we might have been: it allows the sentencing calculations to be redone and some planning to then happen in the normal way, so that we can make sure that, when those people are released into the community, they have a proper release plan in place. Once we are into the prospective element of the change, I believe that the process will be much smoother, and probation will be able to do a much more effective job of managing those prisoners as they are released into the community.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr iawn, Llywydd. The Secretary of State is entirely correct to say that prisons are in crisis: they have been in crisis for years, and reform is urgently necessary. It is evident that there are many people in prison who should not be there, but that is the only place that they can be—people for whom community-based prevention and rehabilitation would be way better. The last Government promised us a women’s residential centre based in Swansea, but according to an answer to my written parliamentary question earlier this year, delays and uncertainty over planning saw that proposal sidelined. Will the new Labour Government commit to succeed where the last Government so obviously and appallingly failed and facilitate the establishment of a women’s residential centre in Wales, where we have no women’s prison?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I thank the right hon. Member—that is a very compelling bit of lobbying from her. May I offer to meet with her, so that we can discuss this issue in person?