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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for giving me the formal date but I am reliably informed that the practice was not in operation until the end of 2005; otherwise, why would the Minister place such emphasis on the comparative statistics between 2005 and 2006? The comparative statistics that he advanced would be absolutely valueless if the suspended sentence power was fully in operation between April 2005 and December 2005. Having had one year of operation—2006—the Government then introduced their Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill now before your Lordships' House in 2007, revoking the provision in the 2003 Act. We all know that much of the content of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 has either not been implemented or has already been revoked; so in a sense what the Government are doing here is very much in the tradition of what they have done with a whole range of provisions under the Criminal Justice Act 2003. But our main concern about this proposal is that in our view the Government’s position is entirely irrational. A suspended sentence can be used only if the custodial threshold has been reached and the magistrate in question has concluded that imprisonment is the correct sentence. It is only at that point that he is entitled to consider whether, in the particular circumstances of the prisoner concerned, the conditions are present whereby a suspended sentence is appropriate. In other circumstances, a magistrate is prohibited from doing so by the appropriate guidelines. The Government’s view is that a magistrate has complete discretion to move between a suspended sentence order and a community order without any guideline constraint. That is simply not true. The picture that the noble Lord portrays of a magistrate being able so to act, in my submission, is a false one, however admirable the Minister’s motives might have been in bringing it forward. The Minister talked about the Government’s amendment—I think he used the word ““concession””—in another place. The problem that the Opposition have with that concession is that the Government are judge and jury in their own cause. The appropriate affirmative order would be brought forward by the Government only if, in their opinion, they had been mistaken about the matter before your Lordships’ House today; not in anyone else’s opinion at all. So it is entirely within the Government’s power whether they bring forward this order. In our view—again I am not calling into question the good intentions of the Minister—this is a bankrupt concession. Let us be absolutely clear that the real motive for the Government bringing this matter before your Lordships’ House this afternoon is that they are desperately seeking ways in which to take pressure off overcrowded prisons. They believe—in my submission wholly wrongly—that one of the ways of doing so is to revoke this provision in the 2003 Act. A great deal has been said in Committee and on Report about how the Government have totally failed to match the vast increase in new offences that have been introduced over the past 10 years with the availability of prison capacity. That is clearly the crucial background to what the Government are trying to do this afternoon. It will not come as any surprise to your Lordships that I will move my Motion. I beg to move. Moved, Motion A1, as an amendment to Motion A, to leave out from ““House”” to end and insert ““do insist on its Amendments Nos. 9, 301 and 327—(Lord Kingsland.)