My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 82A. I apologise to the House for being a few moments late into the Chamber; my little legs would not carry me fast enough from committee to Chamber.
Amendment 82A amplifies the debate we had on short sentences in Committee. It does not seek to ban short sentences but sets out to reduce the use of custody for less serious offences for which there are better options within the community. The argument made in Committee, that there are already guidelines and the Sentencing Code to guard against the overuse of short sentences, is disproven by the way in which the matter does not arise in sentencing at the moment.
The current arrangements—the ones the Minister spoke of in Committee—appear to be robust in theory because imprisonment is already reserved for serious offences and custody is already described as a last resort. As principles, these sound restrictive but have not proven to be so in practice. The current arrangements regarding the custody threshold are an unsatisfactory test because they can be interpreted as permissive when an offender has experienced all other possible
forms of sentence even though their latest offence is not that serious. The problem with this is that it magnifies the roundabout, which is short sentences without any opportunity for rehabilitation, being outside for a very short period, reoffending and coming back through the system yet again.
This Bill creates a strange ladder of offences because, if you add in the additional features of the community sentences, which is detention in people’s homes, then that increases the features of the system in this first part of the ladder. The ladder then has a rung which has a much shorter stage to the position of imprisonment. We could say that the position after this Bill will be that the first part of the community sentences has much more amplification of the measures that can be used to deal with the sorts of crimes we have been talking about.
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The amendment is designed to build a consensus around the use of custody, aligning the evidence of better outcomes with a choice of sentence. It also aligns with the Government’s position. In the 2020 White Paper from the Ministry of Justice, A Smarter Approach to Sentencing, the Government said:
“While short custodial sentences may punish those who receive them, they often fail to rehabilitate the offender or stop reoffending. Evidence suggests that community sentences, in certain circumstances, are more effective in reducing reoffending than short custodial sentences.”
This is the Government’s position, as outlined in 2020. This amendment makes reforms based on the length of sentence, by clarifying the principles for opposing imprisonment. For this reason, I commend it to the Minister. It would help reduce reoffending. It would help people rehabilitate. It would remove the great problem, as expressed by the Government, that short sentences punish those who receive them but fail to rehabilitate the offender or to stop reoffending.