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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I have some sympathy with Amendment 175. Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, I was taken back into the past. He said that probation reports go into great depth on the effects of sentencing on the offender. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, spoke about reports looking into the background of offenders. That used to be so, but in a serious case in which I was involved within the past 12 months, when a verdict by the jury of murder was reduced to manslaughter, I was shocked to discover that the probation service simply interviewed my client over a video link while he was in Belmarsh prison. He was given no notice; he was spoken to for about half an hour; and the ensuing report was simply a question of assessing the risk for the purposes of an indeterminate prison sentence.