Victims and Courts Bill
Debate between Lord Garnier and Baroness ChakrabartiTuesday 16th December 2025
(2 days, 20 hours ago)
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Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My noble friend is very gracious, but I fear there is a new trend which is not the practice of your Lordships’ House: to have an extended back and forth at Second Reading. I know this may be the practice of another place not far from here but, with all due respect to noble Lords and to my noble friend with her good humour and fortitude, I am not sure that that is something that we should innovate this evening.
Lord Garnier (Con)
I was only going to support the Minister. One of the differences between an appeal by a defendant in a criminal matter and the unduly lenient sentencing system is that anybody can write to the law officers to complain that a sentence is unduly lenient. Many of the people that the Minister and I may have dealt with in the past wrote in having read an article in a newspaper saying that a particular defendant had been given what they thought was a lenient sentence. Nobody does that to appeal a criminal sentence as a defendant.