Sentencing (Pre-consolidation Amendments) Bill [HL]

Lord Judge Excerpts

Second reading committee (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 12th June 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Judge (CB)]

My Lords, I shall mentioned just a few facts. When I retired as Lord Chief Justice, it was already a matter of urgent necessity that we should have a sentencing code. The various difficulties have already been analysed, but I want to add one: that, from time to time, men and women were detained in custody in prison for longer than they should have been because, just as judges found difficulty understanding the criminal justice system, so indeed did the Prison Service. What does this sentence mean? Does this mean that he or she can be given a date of release for x, y or z? From time to time individuals were detained for longer than they should have been.

I have personal experience of a case—it still troubles me hugely—of a young man who was 17 when he committed a relatively minor indecent assault and was put on probation. It seemed a very sensible decision. He broke the probation order and then ran into difficulties, so he was more or less in and out of the courts for some time. By November 2004, he was arrested because by then he had not notified his change of address on a number of occasions. The issue before the court was whether he complied with the notification provisions. This is not major stuff, but there is a provision which requires sex offenders to notify their changes of address. It is a perfectly sensible piece of legislation. When he was hauled before the Crown Court on an indictment alleging this failure, the poor judge who had to decide the case reserved his judgment and decided that the man was guilty of the offence. He sentenced him to three months’ imprisonment.

There was an appeal, because the issue was obviously arguable, and it came before a court on which I presided. Slocombe was the case. What did we have to look at to decide whether he should have notified a change of address? There was the Sex Offenders Act 1997 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994—I put them that way round, apparently strangely, because the relevant provisions had come into force in March 1998; that is, after the Sex Offenders Act had come into force. Before the judge it was assumed that there was nothing in the Sex Offenders Act 1997 which had any relevance to the issue, but then it emerged that there had been an amendment to Section 4(1)(a) of the 1997 Act in paragraph 144 of Schedule 8 to a 1998 Act. That came into force on 1 April 2000 and—would you believe it?—four months later the provision was repealed, but the time mattered because May 2000 was when the young man was being sentenced.

After the relevant provisions had been in force for four months, they were repealed when the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act was introduced. My recollection is that we could not find the four months in which those particular powers applied when we looked on a computer. I was not looking on a computer, but people who could use one were looking for them. Eventually, we found the text by ploughing through the old library. No one at the Crown Court could be blamed because, in the end, we had to look at Section 81 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. That resolved the difficulty, and we decided that the man had not been obliged to notify his change of address. He had pleaded guilty on the basis of a misruling by the judge and had served a three-month sentence for something that he had not committed. That was shocking.

May I add that the account I have given the Committee does not tell your Lordships what notification requirements mean? They involved us looking at these differences in definition: you had to decide between words such as “imprisonment for a term for more than six months but less than 30 months” and “a person sentenced to imprisonment for a term of six months or less”, or, in the case of a young offender “the equivalent sentence of imprisonment”. We had to look at the difference between a period that a person is “liable to serve under a secure training order”—notice “liable to serve”—with the phrase “shall be subject to a period of detention in a secure training centre”, all as part of the legislation which bore on the question of when this young man had finally cleared himself of his notification obligations.

As to where the current law stands on sentencing, in 2015 there was a total of 1,300 typed pages. That was only the current sentencing law because it did not cover the older cases: for example, death by dangerous driving. When I started at the Bar, the sentence for that was two years; then it went to five years, then to 10 years and then to 14 years. There were 14 major pieces of primary legislation, starting with the Criminal Justice Act 1991, followed by—if you want to hear it—the Criminal Justice Act 1993, the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997, and then other Acts in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2015, ending, as at this time, with the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018. Lord Chief Justices do not beg, but as Lord Chief Justice, I pointed out to the then Government that a significant reduction in sentencing laws would be a good idea. I failed. I ask noble Lords to look at the facts and decide whether this is a well-justified Bill.