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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 61: 61: After Clause 19, insert the following new Clause— ““Increase in maximum term that may be imposed on summary conviction of offence triable either way Section 282 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (c. 44) (increase in maximum term that may be imposed on summary conviction of offence triable either way) shall come into force on the passing of this Act.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, after the extremely elevated tone of the previous debate, I almost hesitate to introduce this amendment. Nevertheless, I will introduce it. This is one of a family of issues which the Government advanced, I think, following the report of the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, on Report in another place. I am not going to speculate on the reasons why a number of these measures were introduced; I am simply going to introduce my amendment, which I can do briefly as I did in Committee. I am asking the Government to insert after Clause 19 the following new clause, entitled, ““Increase in maximum term that may be imposed on summary conviction of offence triable either way””. The substance reads: "““Section 282 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (c. 44) (increase in maximum term that may be imposed on summary conviction of offence triable either way) shall come into force on the passing of this Act””." In other words, all we wish to do is to bring into law a matter which the Government always intended to bring into law as a result of the passage of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The amendment would in effect implement a clause that originally appeared in the Government’s Act. I am not sure why the Government have not yet implemented this clause. One of the factors that I think lay behind the Government’s intentions in 2003 was a scheme called custody plus. We know that, for a variety of reasons, it has not been possible to introduce that yet. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s intentions were with respect to it. I have no doubt that factors such as resources, finance and so forth were part of the problem; but there may be other matters as well on which the Government will wish to dilate. Quite independently of custody plus, we think that, in itself, the substance of the proposal in the 2003 Act is inherently desirable. I suspect that the Government are trying to walk away from this because they fear that the consequence of it would be more people going to prison. I see no reason why that should be so. Magistrates have a sentencing structure in which to operate. In so far as I have had experience of watching magistrates’ courts in operation, I have no doubt that they will abide by the appropriate guidelines in their sentencing policy. We think that this is an important power for magistrates to have. For that reason, I beg to move.