Criminal Justice Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 5:08 pm on 5 November 2003.

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Photo of Baroness Anelay of St Johns Baroness Anelay of St Johns Conservative 5:08, 5 November 2003

My Lords, in moving the amendment I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 206, 207 and 208. All the amendments stand in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Kingsland.

The amendments return to an issue debated in Committee on 8th October, as reported in col. 300 of Hansard. Clause 139 deals with the requirement to obtain a pre-sentence medical report before passing a custodial sentence in cases where the offender is, or appears to be, mentally disordered. The combined effect of subsections (1) and (2) is that the court is required to obtain such a report unless it,

"is of the opinion that it is unnecessary".

In Committee, I pointed out that it would be difficult to think of circumstances in which the court ought not to consider a medical report before passing a custodial sentence on such a person. In that, I received support from around the Committee.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, resisted my amendment by saying that the court might already have a medical report before it, perhaps because it had already remanded the offender to hospital for treatment under Section 36 of the Mental Health Act 1983. Her view was that in such a case,

"it would be a waste of time and resources of the court and of the medical practitioner to produce and consider a further report which would add nothing to the information before the court . . . In those circumstances, it would be open to the court to say, 'We don't need to order another report because we already have available to us an appropriate report'".—[Official Report, 8/10/03; col. 302.]

As was pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, that narrow exception may be what the Government intend to address in subsection (2), but the Bill grants a much broader power to the courts to sentence mentally disordered offenders to custody without a medical report if the court's view is that such a report is "unnecessary". That could be for any number of reasons and not just the reason given by the Minister in Committee. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, was particularly concerned about a medical report not being obtained at all due to constraints on resources, a concern that I echoed then and do again today.

My amendments should of course be read together, as they are a package. They address the concerns expressed from this side of the Committee and the point made by the Government. The combined effect would be to place, under subsection (1), an absolute requirement on the court to consider a medical report before passing a custodial sentence on a mentally disordered offender. Subsection (2) would be altered to state that a medical report would have to be obtained by the court in order to fulfil the requirement in subsection (1) unless the court already had access to such a report. I hope that that meets the point made by the noble Baroness in Committee.

Amendment No. 208 addresses a slightly different issue. It would remove subsection (4). I remain concerned that the subsection appears to be declaring that if the sentencing court has not taken the right action and has failed to obtain a medical report, the mentally disordered offender is in the position of being stuck with the sentence and can change that only by being put to the trouble and effort of going to an appeal themselves. As I said in Committee, that seems to be doing things the wrong way round.

I have returned to the issues not simply because I feel that there has been a drafting error, but because the matters concern me. The commitments and duties on the court need to be clarified in this respect. I beg to move.