Sentencing Bill

Third Reading

Motion

Moved by

That the Bill do now pass.

Before I begin, I can update the House that the Scottish Government have granted an LCM. This covers the provisions in the Sentencing Bill on the treatment of national security offenders, which affect the executive competence of Scottish Ministers. I am very grateful to the Scottish Parliament for working with us.

I start by thanking the many noble Lords who have contributed to the Bill through debates in this Chamber and the extensive discussions that have taken place beyond it. Those contributions have shown the very best of this House. I am especially grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for their support and engagement on key measures in the Bill. I also thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, and the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, for their informed interventions and constructive challenge. Lastly, I thank my noble friends Lady Chakrabarti and Lord Blunkett for their contributions. I have enjoyed working with, and have learned a lot from, all noble Lords in your Lordships’ House. I also want to thank the officials who have been involved in the Bill’s preparation and passage, who have supported me so ably.

This is a significant Bill. As I said at Second Reading, it will put our justice system on a sustainable footing fit for the future, one that prioritises victims, fairness and accountability, and one that prioritises punishment that works, but, with the help of your Lordships’ House, we have gone even further to strengthen the Bill. Through its passage, we have added safeguards, and increased transparency, around the new approvals processes for the Sentencing Council; made it a statutory requirement for the Government to lay an annual Statement on prison capacity before Parliament; agreed to remove the power for providers of probation services to publish names, and photos, of individuals subject to an unpaid work requirement; and brought hope to those serving IPP sentences, and their families, by offering a faster and safe route to the end of their sentence.

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, for his kind and generous introduction. This is an important Bill and we on these Benches have supported its principal purposes throughout—those being to address the extreme prison capacity crisis, to move away from reliance on more and longer prison sentences, and to introduce a presumption against short sentences of immediate imprisonment and switch to greater use of suspended sentences, coupled with community supervision. Our concerns now are to ensure that the Government’s ambitions for probation are properly resourced and met, and I know the noble Lord knows how challenging achieving those ambitions will be. It will involve better use of technology, effective use of tagging and in particular making a real success of the recruitment, training and motivation of the Prison and Probation Service.

The noble Lord also knows how much we on these Benches appreciate the engagement that he and the whole Bill team have had with us, but also with other noble Lords across the House. His approach to this Bill, and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, have been a fine example of co-operation across the House driving significant improvement in legislation. We have made important changes and, I think, without wasting time. Among other welcome changes, we are particularly grateful to the Government for agreeing to the removal of Clause 35, with its unfortunate proposals for probation officers to take and publish photographs of offenders undertaking unpaid work. We are also very grateful for the Government’s commitment to thorough, open and regular reporting on prison and probation capacity and staffing. I pay credit to the contributions of my noble friend Lord Foster in this area, as well as for his contributions on gambling.

We believe that the Bill has the potential to move us towards a more effective and humane sentencing system that concentrates on rehabilitation of offenders and reducing reoffending and puts victims at its heart.

My Lords, I too am grateful to all noble Lords for their constructive engagement on this important Bill at every stage of its passage. On behalf of my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie and my noble friend Lord Sandhurst, I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, in thanking the Minister for the open and courteous manner in which he engaged with the House throughout the Bill’s consideration.

We on these Benches are particularly pleased that the Government tabled Amendment 53. We are proud to have championed the case for addressing a serious and unjust gap in the law relating to the imposition of whole life orders for the murder of police and prison officers. We too acknowledge the determined campaigning work carried out by the parents of Lenny Scott after the murder of their son in February 2024. We also welcome the Government’s decision to extend this provision to probation officers, who carry out exceptionally demanding and important work in the service of the public.

I also thank the Minister for Amendment 58, which introduces an annual report on prison capacity. This is an issue which we pressed strongly in Committee. If Parliament is to legislate for significant changes in sentencing and release policy, it is only right that the public are provided with a regular and transparent account of the prison estate. While we would have preferred the Government to commit to a more detailed report, this none the less represents a welcome step forward.

We on these Benches welcomed the passage of the amendment requiring the Crown Courts to provide sentencing remarks free of charge upon request. Victims of crime, and the families of victims of crime, should not be required to pay to access sentencing remarks directed to those who have offended against them, particularly when those remarks are central to the submission of an unduly lenient sentence application. I strongly urge the Government in the other place to recognise the importance of this reform and to support the amendment.

We are deeply disappointed by the rejection of our amendment to exempt the most dangerous offenders from the proposed new early release scheme. This amendment was supported by all non-government parties in the other place, including the Green Party, Reform, independents, Plaid Cymru, a Labour rebel and, notably, the Liberal Democrats. Every single Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament present voted in favour of this amendment, yet in your Lordships’ House every single Liberal Democrat Peer voted against it. That is a sudden and complete reversal in position that is difficult to comprehend.

That divergence is all the more difficult to reconcile given that the Liberal Democrats also tabled an amendment containing exemptions from the automatic release of offenders recalled on fixed-term licences. That amendment was, in substance, closely aligned with ours. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, stated,

“in this case we accept it as a list of serious offences”.—[Official Report, 6/1/26; col. 1165.]

It is therefore unclear why those offences are considered serious for the purposes of the Liberal Democrat amendment but not for ours—an amendment which, I emphasise again, was supported unanimously by their party in the other place.

Above all, we are most disappointed by the defeat of Amendment 25, which sought to prevent domestic abusers and sex offenders from benefiting from an automatic presumption of suspended sentences. We firmly believe that Amendment 25 was necessary to protect women and girls from violence and sexual assault. A direct consequence of government and Liberal Democrat opposition may be that victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse will be forced to live in the same communities as the offenders who abused them. It is not sufficient, we submit, for the Minister to claim that custody remains available in “exceptional circumstances”. As my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie made clear, offences of sexual assault and domestic abuse are, by their very nature, exceptional.

The Government have pledged to halve violence against women and girls by the end of the decade and have recently published the violence against women and girls strategy. Opposition to this amendment exposes those pledges as hollow: the Government speak of protection yet legislate in the opposite direction.

The Liberal Democrats’ decision to vote to keep sex offenders and domestic abusers out of prison is equally difficult to understand. Their justice spokesperson in the other place has tabled a Bill to make domestic abuse an aggravating factor in sentencing, to