§ Mr. OatenTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what steps he is taking to monitor differences in the sentencing of offenders from different ethnic groups in(a) England and Wales and (b) London. [155955]
§ Paul GogginsSection 95 Criminal Justice Act 1991 requires the Home Office to publish statistics annually to help those involved in the administration of justice avoid discrimination against any persons on the grounds of race or sex or any improper grounds. The first edition of what has become a series of publications on Race and the Criminal Justice System was published in 1992 including demographic data and prison statistics.
The Home Office is monitoring sentences handed down by the Crown court in terms of the ethnicity of the person prosecuted. A similar programme of monitoring is being developed for magistrates courts. This data will be broken down into the 42 Local Criminal Justice areas (including London) and will also be available for England and Wales as a whole. It has already been published for a number of areas and will be published for other areas once it is of sufficient quality to be statistically acceptable as showing an accurate picture.
The "Ethnic Minorities in the Criminal Courts: Perceptions of Fairness and Equality of Treatment" study published by the Department of Constitutional Affairs (Hood, Shute and Seemungal 2003) concludes that although perceptions have improved since previous studies, more work is needed to eliminate perceived discrimination. The report reveals that although there is no hard research to prove this one way or another, around two thirds of the complaints about racial bias concerned perceived inequitable sentencing, with Black and Minority Ethnic defendants believing they had received a harsher sentence than would have been handed down to a similarly placed white defendant—CJS professionals e.g. lawyers had a stronger perception still. This is likely to be a contributory factor to low BME confidence in respecting the rights of defendants.
The CJS Race Unit will now work to establish whether there is any quantitative evidence of different sentencing between people in different BME and white populations while controlling for type of offence and other contributing or mitigating factors. If there is such evidence the Unit will consider actions to counter it, if not they will address the perception that there is 757W differential sentencing. The Unit envisages awarding the research contract in April 2004. First results are then expected Spring 2005 with completion Spring 2006.