Sentencing Guidelines

Part of 2. Questions to the Counsel General and Minister for Delivery – in the Senedd at 2:56 pm on 21 January 2025.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:56, 21 January 2025

Yes. Thank you, Rhys. I mean, I know you know how this works. So, the Sentencing Council is an independent non-departmental body, and it operates at arm's length from the Government. It's accountable to the UK Parliament for delivering its statutory obligations. I have, though, had the opportunity to discuss sentencing issues on a much wider basis than your question—which I'll come to in a moment—with a number of law officers only last week, where I brought up a number of issues that we're concerned about. I'm particularly concerned, and my colleague Jane Hutt has been working in this area for many years, about the number of short sentences, for example. I have Swansea prison in my Constituency, right in the centre. There's a large number of young men in that prison who have sentences that appear to me to be designed perfectly to make sure they have no further life chances, but nothing to recommend it. So, if you're imprisoned for nine months, it's just enough to make sure that you have a record, that you have family problems, that you lose your home, and that you lose any job that you had, and nothing like enough to get you any kind of substance abuse support—well, any support, really, that you want. So, I have made the point repeatedly that those sentences are very poorly designed and likely to have a detrimental impact on pretty much everyone. It's a view shared by virtually every governor of Swansea prison I've spoken to, and I've spoken to a lot of them over the years. So, I've had that wider discussion.

Theft and pet theft, I agree, is very traumatic. I'm happy to make the views of the Welsh Government known about that, but, I mean, it is not a devolved matter. But I'm very happy to do that—very happy to do that cross-party, if people are happy to do that. But it would be just making our views known; we don't have any actual agency in that area.

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