Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill

Debate between Robert Jenrick and Jonathan Brash

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

How did we get here? It takes a special kind of uselessness to engineer a crisis entirely of your own making and then to come to this House asking for applause as you legislate your way out of it. Let us remind ourselves what actually happened here. The Sentencing Council, an unelected unaccountable quango created by the Labour party, issued guidance that would have divided our criminal justice system by race, religion and identity; a two-tier system as offensive to common sense as it was to the most basic and important principle of equality before the law.

The Justice Secretary, asleep at the wheel, either did not know or did not care. Her officials signed off the guidance, her Ministry nodded it through, and the council published it; the guidance was due to come into force. Only then, after I raised this issue with her in this House, and in the face of fierce opposition from the Conservatives, the press and the public, did she rouse herself from her stupor—only then did she discover her principles.

Even at that point, however, the Justice Secretary did not act decisively. She did not use her powers to sack the architects of this shameful guidance, support my legislation or bring forward immediate legislation of her own to stop it. What did she do instead? She wrote a letter begging the council to reconsider. Such is the pace at which she moves—or, rather, crawls—that it took a further seven days to put her thoughts in writing after a meeting.

When the council did not move, the Justice Secretary threatened action—only to be humiliated by the chair of the council, who made clear that if she tried, he would take legal action and potentially challenge his own Justice Secretary. So incompetent was she that the Opposition had to take it upon ourselves to prepare a judicial review to do the Justice Secretary’s job for her, and such was the level of chaos over which she nominally presided that the Government’s own legal service was trooped out against us to defend the very sentencing guidelines that the Justice Secretary had denounced as two tier.

[Mr Brash]

In November 2023, the Sentencing Council consulted on these guidelines, and said that a pre-sentence report may be “particularly important” if an offender belongs to an ethnic, cultural and/or faith minority community. Does the shadow Minister agree that it was particularly important? I do not. If he does not agree, why did he say nothing for two years?

[Robert Jenrick]

I have to applaud the hon. Gentleman for reading out his Whips’ questions there. I have said it before and I will say it again, however: I do wish that he and those on the Labour Front Bench would stop perpetuating something that is obviously untrue. They know it is untrue. It has been said numerous times. The Sentencing Council itself—[Interruption.] Let me finish my point, because it is important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

That is the very real risk of what we see, not just in these aborted sentencing guidelines, but in the broader fabric of two-tier justice that we are revealing with every passing day. What we all want to see, and what I believe the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) wants to see as well, is equality before the law. That means that in no instance should the law be applied differently depending on the colour of people’s skin or the faith that they abide by. We must all fight against that, because it is immensely corrosive to public trust and confidence in the criminal justice system.

[Mr Brash]

The right hon. Member is painting a terrifying picture of our justice system. In his work, has he managed to identify when these issues all started?

[Robert Jenrick]

The guidelines we are talking about came into force—or would have done—under this Labour Government. I will not return to everything I said earlier, but those of us who were in this Chamber on the day that I revealed this issue all know that neither the Justice Secretary nor any of her Ministers had the faintest idea that any of this was happening. I watched the Justice Secretary look to her Ministers; she was greeted by blank faces. They had no grip on what was happening in their Department.

The hon. Member for Hartlepool makes the good point that the issues that we are discussing predate this Labour Government. This is a broader issue facing our country. We all have to be defenders of equality under the law. I do not seek equality of outcome in our criminal justice system; I seek equality of treatment. That is the heart of a fair criminal justice system. That may be a point of difference between some of us in this House. All I seek is for every person in this country—man or woman, regardless of their religion or the colour of their skin—to be treated exactly the same by the law.

Everywhere we look in the Ministry of Justice, we see this ideology. The most worrying part is that I think the Justice Secretary knows this. She stood here and said that the appearance of differential treatment before the law is particularly corrosive, and I agree wholeheartedly with her.