Coroners and Justice Bill
1:40 pm
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister, Justice; Harborough, Conservative)
No doubt. Governments and bureaucracies of all sorts like to collect information in order to make public policy decisions about the health service, roads, defence and other forms of public spending. I assert that the criminal justice system is no different in that regard. Do you think that the resource implication assessments referred to in clause 109 ought expressly to be directed towards the Ministry of Justice and those who are designing the prison or community punishment estate rather than towards sentences? It has been put to us by those who disagree with me that these resource implication guidelines and resource assessments will have no fetter on judicial discretion—it is simply a way of collecting information so that we can design a criminal justice system based on available resources and deploy them in an intelligent way. My suspicion is that it will build into a form of insidious pressure on the judiciary to sentence in a particular way. Am I being unduly cynical, or do you think there is a practical purpose behind clause 109 that will be of value to the criminal justice system?