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Offender Management Bill

I express the gratitude of Members on these Benches to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, for raising this very important issue once again. The question is really about resources. Will there be enough to have a fair and effective judicial system, or will the judges be constrained by their budget in certain important ways, the most important of which being the sentences that they pass? If the Sentencing Guidelines Council has to take resources into account when determining appropriate sentences, and if judges must take available prison places into account in order to be able to send people to prison, we will have introduced a very new concept into the sentencing policy that has heretofore governed the English legal system. Judges have always regarded it as their duty, not to mention their prerogative, to sentence offenders as they think fit. It is then for the Government of the day to provide the resources necessary for those sentences to be put into effect. A clear distinction has therefore been drawn between the function of the Home Office, in providing prison places, and the judiciary, who are to sentence according to the justice of a particular case and not according to what resources are available. Will the Minister be good enough to share with us the thinking behind the transfer of the prison and parole system to the Ministry of Justice? What was the purpose of that? Why did the Home Office not retain it? We on these Benches have been taxed from time to time in the past few weeks by the fact that the creation of a Ministry of Justice has for some years—someone said 60 or 70 years—been the policy of the Liberals and the Liberal Democrats. Only yesterday, I discovered a paper that we had written on this topic 30 years ago. Very relevant it was; Liberal policies do not die away. The proposal did not, however, include the transfer of the penal system, whether incarceration or probation, to the Minister for Justice whom we had in mind. There are great dangers in this, as the judiciary have warned. A working party has been set up, although it has not reported. There is still a lot of work to do. At this stage, I have only two questions. First, why were prisons and penal matters transferred to the Ministry of Justice? Secondly, can we be assured that any ring-fencing will not impinge on the administration of justice in this country?