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Lord Thomas of Gresford: As I know only too well, it is not in his character ever to change his mind about anything. I am sure that the noble Lord will join us. We oppose this Bill.
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, unjust sentences are a blight on any judicial system. An unjust sentence is one that offers unjustifiable leniency. That leaves the cry of the victim unheard; it leaves the grief of relatives and friends unconsoled; and in some cases it adds the insult of apparent judicial indifference to the grievous wound of crime.
I have spoken for, and written in support of, Victim Support for many years and would respectfully suggest that I require no lessons about that. An unjust sentence is also one which allows and recognises no difference in cases and therefore sentences between one crime, one criminal, and another. Putting a tick in a box is no way to sentence in crime. Life is not that simple, and neither is crime.
I am going to take a citation from one noble and learned Lord present this evening who is the object of our affection and regard. He said:
Recidivism in this country is a grievous social blot. We have a recidivist government with 34 crime Bills since 1979, the last one in 1991, brought into effect in 1992--a great scheme to improve criminal justice, carefully thought out, laboriously considered and put into effect under the aegis of the noble Lord, Lord Carlisle--all thrown away. We have a recidivist Home Secretary. He will keep on doing it all over the place. He has had probation. He has had community service. I just do not know what to do with the man. I suppose that he should be subject to a curfew until after the next election or possibly there should be a mandatory five-year sentence for anyone who stands on a populist platform and tub-thumps for two consecutive Conservative Party conferences--without any exceptional circumstances.
The executive and Parliament have a legitimate interest in sentencing policy and practice. Neither has specific direct expertise. Both have a duty to listen to public opinion. I am not one of those who despises public opinion; nor do I despise any section of the press. Two curious bedfellows led to your Lordships' noble vote last week--curiously, the judiciary and all sectors of the public press. The public are entitled to have information even if your Lordships and I do not necessarily recognise it as conforming with either our prejudices or our opinions. I submit that the purpose in our constitution that Parliament ought to perform in this area is that it has the right to set indications--an indicative pattern of what sentences ought to be.
The objection to the present Bill in Clauses 1, 2 and 3 is not, in my mind, the absolute conceptual objection to minimum sentences. The objection is that they should be mandatory save in exceptional circumstances. The Government contend for a narrow definition of "exceptional circumstances". The Minister was most
If that is the description of the parameters within which judges have to operate, judges will have to do one of two things. They will have to be unfaithful to their oath or they will have to elide the instructions which Parliament gives them in statute. It is very important to remember that point. Contrary to the generally held view when I started at the Bar, judges do not spring perfectly formed as creatures of the Almighty. They are capable of error, just as the rest of us are. Quite often judges admit error rather more gracefully and rather more frequently than full-time politicians, of whom I am grateful to say that I am not one.
My objection to what is being forced upon the country and the judges is that the mechanism is too crude, brutalist and mechanical and does not deal with cases on an individual basis. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway. Therefore, the true remedy is to see what improvements can be made by way of retaining a reasonable judicial discretion within the framework that I describe and accept as the indicative pattern which Parliament is entitled to set down in statute.
I turn to the Young-Tebbit axis. I am pleased that both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord are here. I believe in principle that in many ways my approach is similar to theirs. One of us must go! I favour severe sentences in grave cases: terrorism; deliberate offences of violence; mindless violence in public places; financial fraud (although my eyes must be rather feeble because I do not see a reference to financial fraud in the Bill); offences against children and old people; and domestic burglaries that terrorise people in their homes, which I accept leave people's lives in ashes. Not all domestic burglaries do that. I have suffered a domestic burglary. Burglars entered my garage and took away two lawn mowers. Fortunately, they did not notice the rather more valuable wine at the back of the garage. I was irritated but not mortified. I was not in the position of the old lady who is driven from her home and can never go back because it has been desecrated. The two crimes are different in quality.
When the noble Baroness and the noble Lord raise such questions, I share their detestation of what is normally referred to as domestic burglaries as do all of the judges whom I have ever encountered. The truth is that a domestic burglary of the kind that we are discussing is not to be simplistically described or viewed as a crime against property. In essence, it is a crime against the person and a crime from which the person may never recover. We have no problem at all about the imposition of severe sentences on people who commit such crimes; nor does any preceding speaker in your Lordships' House.
The professional drug dealer is not fit to live in our society for a very long period of time. The noble Baroness put forward the proposition, with which I entirely agree, that virtually every parent of a teenage child is deeply worried about drugs. There is not a single parent in this House or outside it who does not share that, but is there a single parent who wants his or her child of 18, who perhaps is going through a bad phase of addiction and deals in £10 or £15 worth of a Class A drug, to go to prison on an automatic basis for seven years? I rather think not.
To appeal to the public has its virtues, but a populist engine which drives ill-considered legislation has no sensible place in a decent society. We want to aim at something which offers long-term protection. Long-term protection can involve long prison sentences, but I believe every judge and practitioner agrees that many people accommodate themselves to the prison regime because they are subtle enough to do so. Paedophiles are quite happy in prison if they have the company of their friends. They hand round exhibits in cases. (Incidentally, it will be recalled that I moved an amendment to make that unlawful and the Government rejected it.) The professional drug dealer settles down in prison. He has his own small fiefdom. When he comes out he is an extremely dangerous man.
We need to consider these matters with great care. We have more than one weapon with which to fight crime. No government, present or immediately prospective, will have all the right answers, but we need to adopt care in what we do. Care is missing from the structure of the Bill.
The sentencing regime for which we contend should, as many noble Lords have said, be open and transparent; but it is nonsensical to invite a High Court judge to say, "I am sentencing you to life imprisonment. By the way, you can expect to serve 18 months". That is a perversion of the system. It will bring the whole system into disrepute. If it brings it into disrepute on that basis, it will have brought it rightly into disrepute on that basis.
It is said that no one will serve more real time--to use the rather tedious jargon. A woman at present often feels that a six-year sentence for rape is insufficient to mark the dreadful wound and the dreadful wrong done to her. We know from the Home Office, we know from the Bill, that that six-year sentence--about the minimum one would expect in rape--will have to go down to four years. I am glad that it will not be me who has to explain that to the complainant in question.
We have to look at these things with some care. Manslaughter is an offence which covers an enormously wide spectrum--the single blow outside the public house, the man falls on the pavement, and dies. On the other hand, one can have month after month after month of the cruellest treatment of a child who then dies. They are both manslaughter. They are utterly different in quality and nature, and they should be different in the penalty which they attract.
That leaves outside the questions touched on earlier by those who well know these matters, not least the judges. It leaves out the question of diminished
There is nothing in Clause 1 which deals with the persistent paedophile. Nothing! If the defendant has preyed on children for years, and commits offence after offence after offence, so long as it is not within the category of having sexual intercourse with a girl under 13--very often they are not--then this will not catch that man. There is something deeply wrong about those proposals. They attempt to meet public disquiet, and they will not be able to perform that function.
There is the question of the assessments for these new bases of release. The noble Lord, Lord Belstead, said--who knows better than he?--that that will involve 25,000 assessments per year. There are not the resources or expertise to carry that out.
My noble friend Lord McIntosh of Haringey rightly pointed out that he is alert and astute to the worries and fears mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Cathain, about women being afraid to go out at night. I agree. No proper society can tolerate that. But one of the things that people out and about on their reasonable occasions at night fear is street crime and mugging. My noble friend Lord McIntosh of Haringey perceptively and rightly pointed out that they are not covered by the Bill.
I shall not be long, because we are coming to the end of a long evening. But one of the things we need to do is to ask ourselves what is the prime function of a government in this connection. It is not the prime function of a government merely to try to get re-elected on any basis whatsoever. It is the function of a government--this has been a failed function for this Government over the past many years--to provide a calm and orderly life for their citizens so far as they may. That means that crime is discouraged and prevented; that crime is detected; that criminals are convicted. That is not happening.
The conviction rate in rape has been dropping substantially these past few years. Criminals must be rightly sentenced and properly dealt with in prison. It is a dereliction of duty to put people in prison for a long time without at least making an effort as regards education, rehabilitation and training in skills for possible employment, although that is difficult enough.
A reasonable basis on which to approach such matters is always to suspect announcements made at party conferences. I have not described which party conferences I have in mind, but it may be a rule of general present application.
This has been an extraordinary debate. The names that I am about to mention are extraordinary. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Bingham; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Taylor, whose speech I reread with great profit and pleasure; the noble Lord, Lord Carlisle, whose recent James Kingham Memorial Lecture might usefully be studied by Home Office Ministers; the noble Lord, Lord Belstead; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson of Lymington; and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Ackner, with his proposal, which I believe to be soundly based, that in the interests of public safety and security we must look at the Butler proposals again.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, first, I am delighted to see the noble and learned Lord, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, who has sat through tonight's debate with enormous patience. I am grateful that he has been present because I know of the interest that he takes in the debate.
It has been an extremely lively and interesting debate. The Crime (Sentences) Bill contains many important and in some respects radical proposals. It is not surprising that a range of strongly held and sincere views have been expressed about them. I am grateful to my many noble friends who have spoken so eloquently in support of the Government's proposals. Perhaps I may move straight on to some of the points made during the debate. If noble Lords will forgive me, I will, as has been characteristic of me in past times, romp through as much as I can in a relatively short time.
The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, criticised me for not referring to people. The number of offenders referred to by me are people. They represent great pain, great distress and much grief to another group of real people: the victims. Nothing that I have said takes the humanity out of this debate. It is our concern for people, especially innocent people, that brings this Bill before the House today.
The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, was rather patronising to my noble friends who spoke in support of the Bill because he accused them of speaking from--the noble Earl, Lord Russell, may find my comments amusing but his noble friend accused them of speaking from a point of ignorance. The collective expertise--
9.48 p.m.
"It cannot be right for sentence to be passed without regard to the gravity, frequency, consequence or other circumstances of the offending."
I add my gloss. I take "circumstances of the offending" to mean of the offence and the offender in question. The words are those of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Taylor of Gosforth.
10.7 p.m.
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