Clause 1
Offender Management Bill
10:15 am
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister (Home Affairs), Home Affairs; Harborough, Conservative)
I am grateful for that clarification and I apologise if I misunderstood the hon. Gentleman. He is making points of public interest, not of party political difference, and if we can re-work the Bill so that those points are included or dealt with through public undertakings given by the Secretary of State through one of his Ministers, it will be all well and good. It is important for the Government to understand that the concerns of the public and of members of the Committee about the current state of the Bill are genuine. We are not here simply for the sake of hearing our own voices.
I take on board everything that the hon. Member for Stafford has said. He has talked about the requirement for greater emphasis on the victims of crime and has referred to proposed paragraph (d), which refers to
“ensuring offenders’ awareness of the effects of crime on the victims of crime and the public”.
I am not sure how much more emphasis we can put in the Bill. We are deeply concerned, both as constituency Members of Parliament and as legislators, that the consequences of crime for victims should be brought home to the criminal. The courts are keen to emphasise that, and from reading any number of probation officers’ pre-sentence reports, I know that it is uppermost in their minds when they advise the court about the proper sentence. The hon. Gentleman will remember, from his days as an advocate in his part of the world, that that is true. Increasingly, the public at large wants to be assured that the criminal justice system pays attention to the needs of victims.
The hon. Gentleman has mentioned the issue of public education, which is a huge topic, but I am not sure how one can ensure that the Bill will lead to better public education about the work of the probation service. I accept the more general point that the work of the probation service, whether in the state sector—as is currently the case—or provided by third sector or private companies, is hugely misunderstood. To see that, one needs only pick up a newspaper following the making of a sentence.
I shall give the example of a case in which I was engaged. Last year, I had to sentence a young man of about 15 or 16 who had destroyed about £3 million of property belonging to a bus company in London by committing arson on about 10 buses. He had been on remand for about nine months and had an IQ of about 70—he was just above the intellectual level below which he would have been designated educationally subnormal. Bearing it in mind that he had been in custody for nine months—effectively the equivalent of an 18-month custodial sentence—and that he was severely intellectually impaired, I gave him a community punishment. In the following day’s newspapers, the case was reported as, “Judge Lets Off Vicious Arsonist”.