LENGTH OF CUSTODIAL SENTENCES (Hansard, 20 February 1991)

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
We now come to amendment No. 87.

§ Mr. John Patten
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is probably entirely my fault, but was Government amendment No. 9 called?

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Government amendment No. 9 comes next. In between we have an Opposition amendment, No. 87, to deal with.

§ Mr. Randall
I beg to move amendment No. 87, in page 2, line 42, after 'offence', insert `where the offender has been previously convicted of one or more such offences'. This amendment would restrict the provisions for courts to give violent or sexual offenders and those with previous records of violent or sexual offences longer sentences than the offence deserves. Clause 2(2)(b) empowers courts to give violent or sexual offenders sentences longer than the offence deserves if they consider it necessary to protect the public from serious harm by the offender.
This provision is not aimed at offenders who commit the most serious offences. Those offences which are triable only on indictment are excluded from clause 2 and would continue to be governed by the present sentencing criteria. Those offenders would, therefore, continue to receive lengthy sentences in line with Court of Appeal guidance which has produced swingeing increases in lengths of sentence for violent and sexual offences since the mid-1980s.
399 According to the White Paper "Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public" of February 1990, this provision is aimed at offenders convicted of less serious offences, but where the court realises that they are at serious risk of causing actual bodily harm which would merit a 12-month sentence. Under the proposed legislation the Crown court could give a longer sentence up to a maximum of five years if it considered it necessary to protect the public from serious harm by the offender.
In public statements before the Bill was published, the Minister justified the proposal on the ground that it was needed for persistently violent sexual offenders whose previous pattern of offending led the court to believe that they were a serious risk to the public. However, there is no reference to "persistence" in the clause.
In the absence of a history of previous offences, there can be no grounds for concluding that the first-time offender who is before the court for a minor offence against the person must be in prison for longer than the offence deserves to protect the public from serious harm.
When the amendment was discussed in Committee on 6 December, the Minister referred to it as an "excellent" amendment, and agreed to reflect on it. By tabling the amendment again, we have given him the opportunity to inform the House of the results of his reflection.

§ Mr. John Patten
It was an excellent, extremely well-drafted amendment. I have reflected on it, and the Opposition are still wrong and I am right, for the following reasons. The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, West (Mr. Randall) was right in saying that the policy that sentences longer than can be justified by the seriousness of the offence should be available for persistent, violent and sexual offenders was set out in the White Paper. This is the group of offenders most likely to be a risk to the public and about which the House has the greatest concern.
It is also likely that the offenders for whom the courts judge a longer sentence to be appropriate are likely to have previous convictions, most of the time of a nature similar to the offence for which they have been convicted, and would therefore satisfy the test set in the Opposition's excellently drafted amendment. I do not disssent from what it is trying to achieve. However, we need to consider carefully whether we can rely on offenders from whom the public needs to be protected always having previous convictions of a similar nature. This may be exceptional to rare, but there may be offenders whom the courts judge, from their pattern of behaviour, to be dangerous but who have never been convicted before. In some cases, they may have been convicted when younger, but were only cautioned, although a series of cautions would show the way in which they were developing.
The protection of the public from dangerous offenders is so important that it would not be right to let the courts' ability to afford the public this protection to hang on whether the offender had previous convictions. In Committee, we were often told that nothing should be ruled out when writing legislation because we have to provide for the exceptional, strange or peculiar case. That is what we are doing in resisting the amendment.

§ Mr. Randall
That is a disappointing reply to what we thought was a radical and forward-looking amendment. However, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.