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Coroners and Justice Bill

This amendment has in a sense already been spoken to by the Government but it is next in the grouping. I add a comment in support of the previous government amendment, because I want to have on the record an important implication of it. Amendment 188CB was to do with, ""the impact of sentencing decisions on victims of offences"." It goes without saying that as part of the sentencing guidelines the council must include the impact of sentencing decisions on the victims of offences. We have constantly restated that everything that prevents reoffending has a direct impact on the victim. The more that they and we can feel secure, the better it will be. That is principally through the use of effective and robust community sentences, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, the distinguished former Lord Chief Justice, just said. In fact, we would favour putting subsection (11)(d) at the top of the list of the council’s considerations. In particular, it seems to us that it would also open the door to the greater use of restorative justice, something which has not been mentioned in this context, which probably has the most direct impact of all for a large number of victims. It is a subject that has been widely discussed, analysed, piloted and promoted—most notably, of course, by the former chief constable of the Thames Valley Police, Sir Charles Pollard. The evidence for giving closure to victims following an offence is powerful, and the case for it generally is equally powerful. However, it remains to be rolled out more generally and enthusiastically by the Government. I urge the Government to accept that as part of their responsibility for the future. Of course, it would require commitment and a certain amount of expenditure on training people, and so on, but I point out that it is part of the toolkit in many areas of the country, especially some police areas, in a relatively routine way, and has been surprisingly useful in schools and communities. If that were to be the outcome of the government amendment, it would be really significant and powerful. I move to our amendment on effectiveness and cost. We believe that splitting the two is a small but significant amendment. Effectiveness in preventing reoffending, which we have already discussed at length, should be considered separately from cost, although one may reinforce the other. The same is true when it comes to the council promoting awareness more widely to treat the two elements of effectiveness and cost as distinct. It is helpful to consider what is meant by cost in this context. Is it simply financial or are we talking about social and human cost, and to what are they related? I certainly do not agree with the Government that it is not just the availability of resources that they should require the council to consider. The report of the New Economics Foundation last year, for example, considered women offenders and highlighted how the criminal justice system’s focus on short-term control and narrow reoffending targets is actually costing us more in the long term. Prison costs much more than the community alternatives, which are much more likely to turn lives around. That report suggested that a body similar to NICE, which has helped to prioritise cost-effective treatment in the health service, could be applied to the criminal justice system. The Corston report recommended setting up small secure units so that women can be nearer to home and family, as well as a network of support and supervision centres to administer community sentences. They may cost money initially, but in the long term they are not only cost-effective financially, but far cheaper in social and human terms, when contact with children can be maintained, as well as addressing the offending behaviour. For every pound invested in these effective alternatives, it has been calculated that society benefits by £14. If reoffending were reduced by just 6 per cent, the saving to the state in one year would equal the cost of setting up the whole system. The human cost is, of course, difficult to measure, but 160,000 children lose a parent to prison each year and at a stroke they become more at risk of being sucked into the criminal justice system themselves. Some long-term investment in their mothers would pay dividends in savings to society. This sort of long-term view does not come naturally to politicians, I acknowledge, least of all in a recession, but we must keep these issues in the front of our minds if we are not to go on paying an increasingly unacceptable human price in the way we deliver sentences.