Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do not insist on its Amendments Nos. 9, 301 and 327, to which the Commons have disagreed, and do agree to Amendments Nos. 9A, 301A and 327A proposed by the Commons to the words restored to the Bill. The other place has voted by a majority of 282 to 216 to reject your Lordships’ amendments to remove Clause 10 of the Bill, but in a spirit of compromise the other place has agreed an amendment that would enable the abolition of suspended sentences for summary-only offences itself to be suspended and, if appropriate, reactivated. Such a suspension or reactivation would be given effect by an order subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. When this House last debated this provision, on Report, noble Lords on the Benches opposite and on the Cross Benches seemed to believe that Clause 10 would have the opposite effect to that anticipated by Her Majesty’s Government. This is not the occasion to set out again our case in full. I say briefly that it is our firm contention that the evidence since the introduction of suspended sentence orders in April 2005 points clearly to their being used in the case of relatively low-level offences not as an alternative to custody but as an alternative to community sentences. In the other place yesterday, the honourable David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, made an interesting and well argued speech on this issue. He pointed out that the increase in the use of suspended sentence orders was even bigger for each-way and indictable offences, both in magistrates’ courts and the Crown Court, than for summary offences. Those indictable, each-way suspended sentence orders were available before 5 April 2005, when Section 189 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 came into force, but the post-2003 Act suspended sentence order is different from the pre-2003 order. For a start, such an order can be awarded even if no exceptional circumstances exist. Moreover, a supervisory community element can be included in it. It can be for an offence that would not demand up to 12 months’ imprisonment. The honourable Member of Parliament demonstrated that there is a real problem both for indictable, each-way offences and for summary-only offences. Our Bill deals not with the whole problem—let me be frank about that—but only with the summary offences part of it. The figures show clearly that the prison population is not falling commensurately with the huge increase in suspended sentence orders. The only explanation can be that courts, both Crown and magistrates’, are imposing suspended sentence orders, which must mean that the prison tariff has been reached, whereas previously they would have awarded community sentences and, in some cases, even fines. Perhaps I may deal with the figures. For summary-only offences, between 2004 and 2006, the number of suspended sentence orders went up from 700 to 12,700 and, between 2005 and 2006, they went up from 4,100 to the same figure of 12,700. In percentage terms, the increase in the immediate custodial rate for summary-only offences was marginally down, from 2.1 per cent to 1.9 per cent between 2004 and 2006 and from 2 per cent to 1.9 per cent between 2005 and 2006. But the rate of suspended sentence orders went up from 0.1 per cent to 1.1 per cent between 2004 and 2006 and from 0.3 per cent to 1.1 per cent between 2005 and 2006. Those figures tell a clear story. Let us look at two summary offences. With the offence of common assault—the summary offence only—in 2004, 1 per cent of defendants were given a suspended sentence. In 2006, 8 per cent were given such a sentence. Between those years, the numbers of those who got community sentences and those who went to prison remained stable. Fines fell by 5 per cent and conditional discharges fell by 5 per cent. Let us look at those same years and the offence of drinking and driving. In 2004, less than 1 per cent of defendants got a suspended sentence while, by 2006, 3 per cent had suspended sentences. Numbers serving community service between those two years for that offence had fallen by 4 per cent; custody had also fallen, but by 1 per cent only. Fines and conditional discharges both remained stable. That would suggest that with summary offences there has been an enormous increase in suspended sentences but a very marginal decrease in those sentenced to immediate custody.