2 days ago
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Ministers expect the Sentencing Council to suspend plans for new sentencing guidelines that could have led to criminals getting different sentences depending on their age, sex and ethnicity.
The expected climbdown hours before the guidance would have come into force comes after a standoff with the Ministry of Justice and threats of emergency legislation to override the guidelines, which provoked claims of a “two tier” justice system.
The new guidelines would require magistrates and judges to consult a pre-sentence report before deciding whether to imprison someone of an ethnic or religious minority, or a young adult, abuse survivor or pregnant woman.
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, had the prime minister’s backing to bring a bill to the Commons this week to overrule the guidelines, which were due to come into force in England and Wales on Tuesday.
However, Mahmood had been told that it was impossible to pass the bill before the Easter recess, meaning there would have been a confusing short period where the guidelines would have applied. “Shabana has been working incredibly hard to avert this,” one source said.
Ministers still plan to pass a bill overruling the guidelines, but the decision to suspend their implementation will avert a potentially chaotic process.
The leader of the House of Lords, Angela Smith, is said to have raised concerns about using the government’s political capital to ram a bill through so quickly given the likelihood of provoking anger from senior legal minds in the Lords.
The threat of legislation came at the end of a breakdown in relations between Mahmood and the Sentencing Council. After the guidance was first published, Mahmood wrote to the chair of the council, Lord Justice Davis, calling for the change to be scrapped and insisting there would “never be a two-tier sentencing approach under my watch”.
Davis suggested he would defy that pressure on Friday, however, saying the council had concluded “the guideline did not require revision” and blaming a “widespread misunderstanding” for the backlash.
He added in a letter to Mahmood: “The rule of law requires that all offenders are treated fairly and justly by judges and magistrates who are fully informed about the offences, the effect on the victims and the offenders. The section of the guideline relating to pre-sentence reports is directed to the issue of information about offenders, no more and no less.”
Mahmood has ordered a review into the role and powers of the council which may also require new legislation, likely to be part of a wider sentencing bill due to be published after the sentencing review being undertaken by the former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke.
A No 10 spokesperson said on Monday that the government was committed to considering more broadly “the role of the Sentencing Council”, but added: “We’re obviously not going to rush that work, and we will consider it carefully.”
He refused to rule out the Sentencing Council being scrapped. Asked why, the spokesperson said: “I’m just not going to get ahead of the work being done. We are not going to rush into ruling anything in or out. We need to look at the Sentencing Council and its role carefully, and any further changes will be set out in due course.”
