My Lords, I have thought long and hard about this amendment, and I am still torn about it. The other evening, in that rather fractious discussion about trans prisoners in women’s prisons, the Minister rather took me up on my quotes from Twitter, as though I was using Twitter as hardcore evidence, which I was not. He made a valuable point, because he said that putting management and protection first was what was done, rather than following public opinion or what was on Twitter or anywhere else. I have some regard for that. In fact, I had made the same point to the Minister in relation to Harper’s law at the beginning of this Report stage, when I said that sentencing should not be a consequence of an outraged public reaction to something, a campaign or what have you. I would rather feel that sentencing was decided in the cold light of day, much more rationally, and so on. I worry about knee-jerk legislation.
I suppose I want to ask a couple of questions, of both the Minister and the mover of the amendment. Sentencing often seems subject to caricature on both sides. People are caricatured as bleeding-heart liberals who want everybody to be let out of prison, and anyone who is concerned about increasing sentencing is caricatured as “lock them up and throw away the key”. It seems to me that there needs to be some relationship between sentencing and the public and their views about it, but we do not want it to be arbitrary and reactive.
So, in that sense, I was very positive about the notion of a royal commission that could look at this in the round, take it away from the political world in some ways and allow, if you want, a more rational and considered public debate, as well as a commission looking at it in detail. That seemed to me to be a way forward.
4.45 pm
But I was rather concerned by the way that the amendment was framed with a particular view of sentencing—one that I might well share, by the way, because I am at heart a bleeding-heart liberal myself—