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Coroners and Justice Bill

I want the Sentencing Council to be a success and I want it to be effective, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor wants that, too. My concern is that the Bill as drafted does not offer any certainty that the Sentencing Council will be effective. There is no certainty that it will address in sentencing guidelines the need to reduce reoffending or to change the attitudes of courts by ensuring that that is at the front of their minds. I am not so concerned about the courts' ability to deal with the very serious cases of murder or with criminal gangs and so forth—those matters can be left for judges to decide—but I do not think that judges have demonstrated an ability to understand the need to intervene on prolific low-level offenders or the need to nip offenders in the bud. There is considerable amount of evidence, in work funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, that taking judges out to see the work of community sentences can be very effective in improving the standard of sentencing. In the Public Bill Committee I offered three propositions and I very much hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will take them seriously. If he does not accept the two amendments proposed by the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth), I hope that he will think further and perhaps introduce amending provisions in the other place. The first of my three propositions is that people should be appointed to the Sentencing Council on the basis of their capacity to evaluate evidence on the effectiveness of sentences. I suggested amendments in Committee to put that directly into the Bill. At the moment, the council looks too much like a comfortable judges' club. The question of effectiveness that the hon. Member for Cambridge underlined in moving the amendments is absolutely critical to whether the Sentencing Council is going to be a valuable addition or not. Secondly, I believe that the Sentencing Council should be given a clear purpose, which is absent from the Bill. We discussed that in a very good debate in Committee and I hope that my right hon. Friend will take it on board and set out what the Sentencing Council is for in a new clause in the other place. My final point is the need to clarify clause 103, which specifies five principles to which the council must have regard. The reference to""their relative effectiveness in preventing re-offending"" appears only in the second half of the fourth of those items. That would be made more explicit if we lifted it up the agenda by accepting amendments 20 and 21. If my right hon. Friend will not accept those propositions today, I urge him to make it absolutely clear in the Bill that this place expects the Sentencing Council to add value to the work of the courts and to attach great priority to advising the courts on what works in reducing reoffending.