Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-01
Topic: Law and Crime
Edward Garnier (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my fellow trustee of the Prison Reform Trust, the noble Lord, Lord Bradley. The whole House could agree with everything that he said. I thank the right reverend Prelate for introducing these amendments because, again, I do not think that they are, in their thrust, controversial at all I have stopped being a sentencer. I was a Crown Court recorder from 1998 until 2015, with a short gap when I was a Minister, and it became an increasingly difficult part of my judicial life. With the greatest respect to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, I suspect that he may once have been a recorder, but he spent most of his judicial life as a High Court judge, a Court of Appeal judge and the Lord Chief Justice. Essentially, when you get to that great height within the judicial system, you are dealing with life sentences and trying to work out the tariff that a murderer should get. You are not dealing with what a woman, probably in her late teens or early twenties, with a child should receive for her 10th offence of shoplifting—unless, of course, it came to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division. I have absolutely no doubt that the noble and learned Lord will have dealt with those sorts of cases on appeal with the attention, intellectual rigour and humanity that we would all have expected of him It may only be the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and possibly the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, who, like me, have sentenced what I might call "ordinary" criminals in the Crown Court. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, is of course too modest to mention that his wife, Judge Levitt, now deals with these matters on a daily basis in the Crown Court. But one of the things that recorders and amateur judges like me, who perhaps do four or five weeks in a Crown Court during the course of a year, have to cope with is the sad people—be they men, women, young teenagers or adults—who come before us for repeated low-level but very annoying criminal offences, such as shoplifting in order to fund a drug habit and so forth The one thing that we were determined to do—I do not think that this is controversial—is not send people to prison when it would cause more damage than benefit, both to them, as individual defendants, and their children. Remarkably, the older teenagers and young people in their early twenties who had not just one but two or three children were our daily bread and butter, and we were anxious not to send them to prison if we could possibly help it because of the effect that it would have on their children I hugely thank two people, one of whom is in this Chamber, for their influence on my coming to understand the difficulties of sentencing and putting people in custody, particularly women. One was James Jones, the former Bishop of Liverpool, who was the right reverend Prelate’s predecessor but one—perhaps her immediate predecessor. The other is the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who, for me, is the source of information about the prison system. If you read his book about it, and the opening chapter, which concentrates on Holloway—now shut, thank God—you will begin to understand just a bit of the difficulties that amateur sentencers, magistrates and Crown Court recorders, but also the equivalent of Judge Levitt, have to cope with, day in, day out. These are anxious decisions about what to do with women and children whose offences are sufficient to cross the threshold for custody—but, if they are sentenced to prison, what collateral damage does that cause to others?