Government: Draft Legislative Programme

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Shutt referred to homework being set for the vacation. At 11 am today, an hour and a half ago, I was given my homework: two large reports, Relations between the Executive, the Judiciary and Parliament, which refers to executive interference in sentencing, and The Constitutional Role of the Attorney-General. Both of these have been released on the last day of term, giving us no opportunity to comment on them. I understand that the Attorney-General report will be followed by a Statement from the noble and learned Baroness herself later in the day. When I look at the procedures of the draft legislative programme, I realise that it is rather cynically that we are not given the assistance from the Government that we are entitled to. On the Attorney-General’s role, which appears under the Constitutional Reform Bill, there is to be in the Bill implementation of any changes arising from the consultation on that role, which will presumably be announced this afternoon. I shall say what, in outline, our attitude will be; I shall try to pre-empt the noble and learned Baroness by stating something of the Liberal Democrat position. We believe that prosecution is a legal, not a political, decision, and that it is right to remove the superintendence of the Attorney-General of the Crown Prosecution Service and any decisions to prosecute unless statute demands it. We think the CPS should become the sole prerogative of the Director of Public Prosecutions, answerable through the Ministry of Justice. We believe that any advice given by the Attorney-General should be transparent, particularly advice to ministries on the meaning of existing or proposed legislation, especially the basis of those Human Rights Act statements that appear at the front of every Bill but tell us absolutely nothing of the arguments on which they are based. We also think that the Attorney-General must cease to be a political animal, a Member of the Cabinet answering questions from the Dispatch Box and proposing legislation, and should instead assert the traditional independence of that role. Those are some advance ideas, which I hope will be taken into account when the draft legislative programme is firmed up for the purposes of the Queen’s Speech. I turn to the proposed Bill on counterterrorism. I am distressed to hear, as we did yesterday, of the possible extension of pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects beyond the current limit of 28 days. I thought Parliament had come to a firm decision on that. It seems the Government simply do not understand what the purpose and meaning of the charge process is in criminal prosecutions. It is not the end of the process, after months of looking at what has been recovered by a search in terms of mobile phones, computers and so on, but rather the beginning. It is an important beginning, where the police take a decision at an early stage. We will resist any extension of the 28-day limit, not only because it is a pointless exercise but because it interferes so much in the rights of the individual as to damage community relations. It is not surprising that a feature of recent terrorist attacks is that they have come right out of the blue from unexpected quarters. Why? Because, as a result of government action, the communities concerned are disaffected and do not provide the information on which the security services and the police can act in order to detect these crimes. They have some success, of course, but the recent attacks have shared those features. I turn to the proposed Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. I am surprised to see that there is nothing in that on the repeal of the Sale of Honours Act 1925. It is a short Act that has been found not to be fit for purpose, and I should have thought that the Government would have immediately got down to redrafting it in a way that would catch things like failing to report loans to the treasurer of the party who has a statutory duty to report it to the Electoral Commission. I should have thought we might have something along those lines in a criminal justice Bill, and I give notice that we may well consider putting forward amendments to that effect in the Bill that is coming forward. The next matter is the ending of automatic sentence discounts for offenders, resentencing to an indeterminate sentence and so on. This is another attempt by the Executive to interfere with the sentencing powers of judges, and today’s report, to which I referred earlier, condemns that very thing. The Select Committee on the Constitution has underlined in terms how unfortunate it was that the Sweeney case in Cardiff was a test that the Government failed. It said that, "““it is clear that there was a systemic failure. Ensuring that Ministers do not impugn individual judges and restraining and reprimanding those who do is one of the most important functions of the Lord Chancellor””." Your Lordships will recall that Dr John Reid, fired with more testosterone than an entire team of cyclists in the Tour de France, said that Mr Justice Williams passed a sentence that was ““unduly lenient”” in that case. I notice that there is also a provision for violent offenders. Here we go again: we started off with anti-social behaviour orders, we went on to orders under the Terrorism Act and now we are coming to violent offender orders. All of them have the same requirement that the standard of proof required in a criminal case is thrown aside and the civil standard is adopted instead—in particular, the procedures in civil proceedings for evidence that is hearsay. There are a lot of things that I have no doubt we will discuss in much more detail as these Bills come before us. The Government, although showing signs through producing this programme that they are advancing in transparency, are still failing down on a number of issues.