House of Commons Hansard Debates for 4 Nov 1996 (pt 16)

6.3 pm

Mr. Peter Brooke (City of London and Westminster, South): The hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Carlile) is not fighting the next election, and I do not

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know whether we shall have the pleasure and privilege of hearing him speak again in the Chamber. I hope that we shall. This is an important Bill and an important debate and he has made a considerable contribution to it, not only in his speech but by tabling an amendment on which the debate can be conducted.

I shall be brief because voices much more learned than mine are waiting to speak. I have already had the privilege of hearing distinguished speeches from two former holders of the office of Home Secretary, and I look forward to hearing my right hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd). My constituency has a legal dimension as it contains the central criminal court, the law courts, two of the inns of court and the Law Society. I am not representing the judges tonight and I should say especially that I have not discussed the matter with my brother, who is himself a judge and who likewise declines to sit on applications for judicial review in cases in which I have been, in any way, part of the preceding controversy.

I come to the Bill without expert knowledge, but I must acknowledge a whiff of agnosticism. I realise why the Home Office and the judiciary approach such matters differently--my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker) mentioned the reason--but, as a Tory, I am uneasy when any Government and the judiciary are at variance. Therefore, I approach legislation that comes out of such an impasse with at least a tinge of scepticism. Cases that I might have raised--and I came to the House armed with examples--have been raised by others and I shall not simply rehearse and reiterate them.

I put to the House, as one who was once a Customs and Excise Minister, the case of the drug dealer who helps to roll up the whole of the team. That example was raised in an intervention by the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr. Tipping), and my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary said that it would be considered an exceptionality. When my right hon. Friend the Minister of State winds up, I hope that he will feel able to give us other examples of exceptionality, because I was encouraged to hear that the case of the drug dealer would be considered in that way.

It would also be helpful if my right hon. Friend the Minister of State explained specifically the faults, as the Government see them, of the proposition advanced by the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) for staged sentences. At first blush, such sentences appear to be transparent and not a million miles away from the briefing by the Law Society, which reached some of us today, in advance of the debate. I share too the query posed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Hurd), in which he balanced the effect on the judges of not being trusted by the letter of the Bill with their being invited to reduce the prison population. I shall leave aside the question whether the current rising prison population is a function of reasonable judicial severity, rather than softness, but the coded messages may be wrongly read and the prison population may rise.

I have a couple of other case histories to enter into the filter of the Bill. The first is that of an inadequate youngster on drugs, perhaps around the age of 21, who acquires drugs and shares the cost of them by securing repayment from his friends. If such circumstances arose, I wonder whether the sentences proposed in the Bill

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would serve as a deterrent to a drug addict who was acknowledged to be inadequate. Secondly, grievous bodily harm with intent is not uncommon in a domestic context. A husband convicted in such circumstances and thereafter facing life imprisonment would be potentially liable to blackmail by his wife. Would the family be prepared to give evidence if life imprisonment were the consequence?

I repeat that I am agnostic about the Bill. I am entirely prepared for my right hon. Friends to prove my apprehensions unfounded, but I have quoted before in the House the observation of Sam Rayburn, the great Texan Speaker of the House of Representatives, that the three wisest words in the English language are "wait a minute". It would be churlish of me, in my present state of knowledge, to withhold my vote from my right hon. and learned Friend on Second Reading, but I shall vote with reservations. I have hinted at those reservations and I hope that they can be overcome.

I realise that by speaking in the debate I make myself liable to be sentenced to sit on the Standing Committee. Given my views, I am a genuine volunteer to sit on it. To my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Mrs. Lait), from the Whips Office--this is the first opportunity that I have had to congratulate her on her pathfinding progress--I can say that I served as a trusty on the Standing Committee on the Housing Act 1996 in the previous Session, and I am happy to call my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Mr. Brandreth) as a character witness to my behaviour on that Committee.

At this moment in the Parliament, we have a particular responsibility to handle legislation responsibly. It may be that the former Home Secretaries who have spoken in the debate are also candidates to serve on the Committee but, on past form, that may not be the case. As the late Damon Runyon suggested, the race is not always to the fastest, nor the battle to the swiftest, but that is the way to bet. I have never served in the Home Office, and my offer to serve on the Standing Committee is as a man on a bus in my fairly legal constituency, headed south towards Clapham.

6.9 pm

Mr. Don Touhig (Islwyn): I welcome the opportunity to take part in the debate. I have an interest to declare, in that I am one of the parliamentary advisers to the Police Federation. Although I do not intend to refer to policing matters this evening, it is only right that the House should be aware of that fact.

The Government have laid before us their latest crime Bill, and have said all along that their intention is to protect the public. That, of course, is the right intention. Everyone expects criminals to be punished for their actions. However, I am not convinced that the Bill will achieve the objective, and the measures contained in it represent a radical change in sentencing practice. Indeed, they could be said to challenge the very premise on which our justice system is based--that punishment should fit the crime. That premise has meant that judges and juries have used discretion when pronouncing their sentences, and have been able to take account of the whole gamut of human experience and emotion when sentencing criminals.

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There are many levels of guilt in society. A report by the Home Affairs Select Committee, "Murder: The Mandatory Life Sentence", published in December 1995, stated:

"All those who gave evidence to the Committee accepted that the crime of murder covered acts of a wide range of heinousness."

A cold-blooded act of terrorism is far removed from an act of mercy killing, and such differences in the levels of blame exist not only with murder. The professional drug dealer, with his international network of contacts and aliases, is a world apart from the pathetic heroin addict, pushing to a few people down the pub to fund his habit. One is driven by greed, the other by physical addiction. Yet under the Bill, both will receive the minimum sentence of seven years--there will be no discretion.

We need to be certain that we are doing the best thing to protect the public by removing discretion. Some would argue that the offences covered by the Bill--murder, manslaughter, rape and so on--are the worst kind, and that whoever commits them in whatever circumstances should receive the maximum penalty. However, we must consider the long-term effects of minimum sentences.

If we introduce minimum sentences as a result of pre-election party political wrangling, we shall do ourselves and the country a great wrong and open the door to minimum sentences for all offences. When that happens--as it will, if we start down this path--we shall be only one step away from the American system of plea bargaining, under which the defence and prosecution haggle like customer and market trader over a pre-packaged sentence that disregards the individual's personal circumstances.

It is not only the theory behind the Bill that is flawed. I am concerned also about the practical consequences of its implementation. What effect will it have on the courts? The Home Secretary appears to have modified his proposals to include an incentive to plead guilty, yet the problem is still there. Faced with the prospect of pleading guilty and receiving a life sentence, or pleading not guilty in the hope of walking away free on some intricacy of law or minor detail, criminals will plead not guilty.

In a speech at King's college, London, on 6 March 1996, the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, said:

"Minimum sentences are incompatible with an existing and important strand in our criminal law. The courts have long followed a policy of discounting sentences for timely pleas of guilty . . . Defendants who know they will receive a mandatory sentence of lengthy imprisonment, and even more so, a mandatory life sentence, are not likely to plead guilty".

It also concerns me, as it did Helena Kennedy QC, who had a letter published in The Times on 12 March, that

"rapists facing automatic life sentences will have no incentive to plead guilty. They will contest the most clear-cut cases, subjecting their victims to further humiliation and trauma".