Terrorist Offenders (Restriction of Early Release) Bill — House of Lords, 2020-02-24
Topic: Law and Crime
David Anderson (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, though in common with some others of your Lordships, I regret the highly accelerated way in which this Bill has been handled, the compressed timetable has one very considerable advantage: the excellent debate we have just had at Second Reading, much of it touching on the subject matter of these exploratory amendments, is still ringing in our ears. For that reason, there seems little point in trying to repeat the full glories of that debate at this hour of the evening, for the battle lines are pretty clear Every speaker who addressed the issue, as the Minister rightly said, sees the need for a degree of retrospective effect to protect the public: the injection of Parole Board review into the sentences of existing prisoners, despite the fact that those prisoners will have been assured by the judge who sentenced them that they would be automatically released by the halfway stage of their sentences. None of us is prepared to see them released before the end of their sentence without the Parole Board’s say-so The issue raised by Amendments 1 and 2 which relate to England and Wales, and Amendment 4 which relates to Scotland, is whether we should go further into the dangerous waters of retrospectivity, as the Bill in its unamended form would do, by providing as a universal rule that not even Parole Board scrutiny will be considered until the two-thirds point of the sentence. This—let us not forget—is in relation to prisoners who are at the bottom end of the terrorism scale where seriousness is concerned and who are not assessed as dangerous by the trial judge or they would have been on a different and more onerous type of sentence On this issue, the European Court of Human Rights seems to be a sideshow. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said—and I agree with him—it is not likely to be contravened by whatever we do. What we need to ask is whether sufficiently cogent reasons have been advanced to displace, in the interests of public safety, the normal presumption that a prisoner’s sentence will not be changed to his disadvantage after it has been passed. On that issue, I will not summarise the respective arguments of what the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, described, perhaps optimistically, as two fantasy football teams of lawyers, although I would correct her in one respect by pointing out that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, as I have confirmed with him, is for these purposes a member of the squad supporting these amendments, along with the former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, the former law officers, the noble and learned Lords, Lord Falconer and Lord Garnier, and the others who made such pertinent contributions, including the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and my fellow signatory, the noble Lord, Lord Beith. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, although not a member of the team, expressed his discomfort about the way the Bill has been written The Minister advanced two reasons in his all-Peers letter which I dealt with in opening, and then two more came along as he wound up the debate. With great respect to him, they were not obviously more convincing. He spoke first of consistency with sentencing regimes where Parole Board consideration comes at the two-thirds stage, but the point goes nowhere for there are plenty of other regimes at which Parole Board consideration happens at half time. He spoke of a breathing space, but the releases that are due in the next few days and weeks—the ones that we are told make this Bill so urgent—are of prisoners who are well past both the half way and the two-thirds point, so the application of one test rather than the other makes no difference in practice and gives the Parole Board no additional scope to draw breath. He spoke of public confidence, but that is a self-serving argument; it is about appearance, not about a real and objective justification. He also spoke of a further period of incapacitation as being an advantage of the scheme in the Bill, but if these amendments were to be accepted, no one would be released at half time unless the Parole Board considered them to be safe, so the only prisoners who will be further incapacitated by the provisions that we seek to amend are those who, in the assessment of the Parole Board, could safely be released That, I suspect, is more than enough from me. I beg to move.