My Lords, I shall be very brief; following the remarks of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, there is not much more to be said. However, I wish to underline, first, that I very much hope that we will have a commitment today from the Minister that the Government do not intend to hold back on the enactment of a sentencing code. We have been through the whole of that process. It was cut short by the general election but it is an absolute imperative, as the Minister well knows and as anybody who has ever listened to the discussions on these issues fully understands. If we are to have changes to prison regimes, let them be done by amendments to an existing code rather than being introduced piecemeal and added on so that we are still looking through 17 volumes of laws to find out what the appropriate level of sentence might be.
My second point is much more general. The Minister’s introduction suggested—and it is perfectly obvious that it is right—that this is just the beginning. The
Government are committed to a wholesale investigation of whether sentencing levels and dates for release are appropriate, and so on and so forth; this is a mere first step.
Speaking for myself, I find it alarming that we have started this process by secondary legislation. The issues raised, as the eloquent speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, made clear, are immensely significant to the entire way we run our punitive system in this country. Yet we are to have secondary legislation for this and, I suspect, a piecemeal series of secondary legislation as the Government’s thinking develops. A very good example—for once I am not looking at the Conservative side; this was Labour legislation—is the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which gave the Minister amazing powers to come to Parliament by way of a statutory instrument and effect enormous changes in our arrangements for prisons. Please, can we be more cautious about dishing out these powers?