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Independence of the Judiciary

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. There are problems. The Prime Minister has made the point on a number of occasions that there could be a situation where what appears on its own to be a relatively small offence is taking place, but if a load of people are doing the same thing in a particular area, and if someone does it over and over again, the very sight of them in the local area can make people feel intimidated. One of the things that we are looking to try out in the community justice centres is a community impact statement. There is a victim’s impact statement, whereby if, for example, an elderly woman is mugged she can write down the fact that she felt afraid to go out afterwards. There is sometimes a need for a description of that sort of offence in relation to the particular community to assist the court in understanding the effect on the community. We have had something analogous to that in the way that we have dealt with unduly lenient sentences. For example, in the first case of human trafficking the charges were rape and other individual offences. When it was referred to the Court of Appeal we explained that it was a new phenomenon—girls were being abducted in large numbers, hundreds of millions of pounds were involved and it was very much part of organised crime—and that we needed to send a message to traffickers that they would be dealt with severely when they were caught. That was a sort of national impact statement about a particular sort of offending. We are thinking about how to draw up a community statement so that the community knows that although something might look like one incident of taking and driving away or of graffiti, the impact on the community, which may be vulnerable and not resilient, needs to be brought to magistrates’ attention. We have sought to put in statute by way of statutory duties the importance of the judiciary’s independence and we have sought to clarify that by disentangling the judiciary from the legislature and the Executive, which was not the case in the role of the Lord Chancellor and the House of Lords Judicial Committee. We have also sought to find ways of building confidence in the judiciary at local level with more community engagement. The process is to write all that down in a big Bill of Rights or a written constitution, as the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey said, with the Human Rights Act 1998, the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and the different constitutional settlements in Scotland, Wales and London. In the olden days people might have taken it for granted that they understood all those things or did not need to understand them and we need to think about how to ensure that people understand the new constitutional settlement and how it fits together. I do not want it to be frozen in time and no one wants power to shift away from the elected part of the constitution to the non-elected part, but the question of how to bring it together and write it down as part of a process so that people understand the totality and can engage in the debate about whether there is yet more to do is a legitimate debate. I appreciate that it is taking place throughout the House. It is an important and constructive debate and I thank the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey for contributing to it. Sitting suspended.