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?
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My noble friend Lord Hailsham is entirely right: when we think about this, we should of course think about others, such as those with learning difficulties or physical disabilities. However, the right reverend Prelate’s amendments and new clauses are about women, so let us think about them. Everything that she said in her introduction and that others have said in their remarks today is utterly uncontroversial. If you sit in a Crown Court in inner London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Leicester or wherever it may be, the concerns that the right reverend Prelate and others have expressed are the very thoughts and concerns that we as sentencers have as we see a young woman with a child in the dock.
What do we do, in practical terms? The most important amendment that the right reverend Prelate has advanced is Amendment 218 on data collection in relation to primary carers. I am not an altogether—how shall I say it?—besotted fan of this Government, but there is one Minister in this House who deals with this subject in whom I have absolute trust: my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, who is on the Front Bench today. I asked him an Oral Question some little while
ago, shortly after he became a Minister and came into this House. He agreed with me that there was insufficient data collection in relation to the matters referred to in Amendment 218.
Because this Minister is on this Front Bench, I have absolutely no doubt that the Government know precisely what we are concerned about and I truly believe that the Minister shares our concerns. We need to encourage him to go back to his Secretary of State and officials in the department to say that this data needs collecting, because without it we cannot make proper or humane policy. Without it, we cannot inform our sentencers, either through the Sentencing Council guidelines, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, or in any other way, on how best to deal with women in particular and carers of children generally when they are before the courts.
As I said, when we sentenced these people, we all had these things in mind. We all anxiously studied the probation reports. We all worried that, in sentencing a mother or father with a child—a single parent—to custody, we were creating a form of orphanage, placing this child in public care. We know that the state is not as good a parent as the natural parent. If I may say so to the right reverend Prelate, I do not think we need legislation on this, but we need information and we need that to be available to judges, sentencers and, more importantly, Ministers, who can direct their officials to produce the humane solution that all of us require. I have absolutely no doubt that my noble friend the Minister is the person to do that for us.