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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 60: 60: Clause 19, leave out Clause 19 The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, at Second Reading, the Minister exercised a very wise discretion in not attempting to explain what Clause 19 is all about. I have read it many times and I am still not sure that I understand it. As one does in such circumstances, I turned to the Explanatory Notes, which say that under this clause the judge must distinguish between three things: first, serious offences; secondly, exceptionally serious offences; and, thirdly, offences with, "““a very extreme degree of exceptionality””." Those are the very words that one finds on page 38 of the Explanatory Notes, which explain the need for the clause. The judge is required to identify something which is exceptionally exceptionable, to use a phrase used by Mr Garnier in the other place. When judges are required to do such things, does that not illustrate what a quagmire we have got into when Parliament takes a hand in sentencing? When I became a judge 30 years ago, sentencing was difficult, as it must always be, but at least there was a framework which we could all understand. Now sentencing has become a nightmare: it is a nightmare for counsel; it is a nightmare for judges; and it is a nightmare for which Parliament must take a very large share of the responsibility. Clause 19 is a good example of the kind of nightmare in which we all now get involved. The purpose of Clause 19, so far as I can ascertain it, is to provide for two types of case which are, on any view, likely to arise only very rarely in practice. I will not attempt to describe them, but leave it to the Minister when he replies. The one thing of which I am absolutely sure is that, by enacting Clause 19, we are only going to make the nightmare worse. We will provide yet more opportunity for judges to slip up—heaven knows there are enough opportunities for that already—and more opportunities for appeals to the Court of Appeal. When the present Prime Minister was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997, his first act was to abandon any attempt to micromanage the rate of interest. He wisely handed that over to the experts at the Bank of England and was much praised for doing so. I respectfully suggest that he now do the same for sentencing. Why does he not accept that the judges are the experts here, guided as they are by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, set up under the 2005 Act, and decisions of the Court of Appeal? Of course, Parliament has a role to play in the broad field of sentencing—there is no doubt about that—but nobody could justify Clause 19 on the ground that it deals with broad grounds of sentencing policy. The experience of the 2003 Act shows what happens when Parliament tries to micromanage sentencing. It is high time that it showed some abstinence in sentencing, and we should make a start now by throwing out Clause 19. I beg to move.