THE Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, has accused the Government of using the Sentencing Council guidelines “to feed a culture war”. Speaking in the House of Lords last week during the Second Reading of the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill debate, she described the move as “distressing”.
The Bill seeks to remove pre-sentencing reports “for certain offenders, including those from an ethnic, cultural, or faith minority”, the Prisons Minister, Lord Timpson, said. The reports are used by judges to consider the sentence that they hand down, be it community or custodial, and “could have led to offenders receiving differential treatment in terms of access to pre-sentence reports based on their faith or the colour of their skin”.
Bishop Treweek, the lead bishop for prisons, said: “I do not believe this is a debate we should be having at all. I do not believe this rather theatrical legislation is necessary.
“At the heart of the Christian gospel is a God who holds together both justice and mercy. We need a big long-term vision . . . about transforming lives and communities, and that includes victims as well as offenders, recognising that many offenders are also victims . . . We need to take account of the impact of sentencing on families and the wider community. I am not saying that people who commit crimes should not receive punishment, but I am saying that sentencing should be much more than this and give the best possible outcomes for society.
“The Justice Secretary says that inequality in society is a matter for policy and not for the judiciary,” she concluded. “How, then, will the Government create an equal society over their term of office so that these guidelines become redundant?”
Several peers were unsure about the implications, fearing government interference in the judiciary’s responsibility for sentencing under the guise of policy. Giving her maiden speech, Baroness Nichols (Labour) deemed that reports “should be available for all offenders and that access to a pre-sentence report should not be determined by ethnicity, culture, or faith”.
The former Archbishop of York Lord Sentamu (Crossbench) welcomed the Bill but said that the Government “should have been much wiser to pick out those characteristics that are prohibited to be used as a basis for exclusion from the Human Rights Act”. As it was, the draft legislation did not acknowledge how “religion and belief are protected characteristics. Why not put in those protected characteristics?”
He was also concerned about references to “cultural background” and “race” as terms. “I was chair of the General Synod’s Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns, which came out of the Faith in the City report. We carried out a survey of the ways of combating racism in the dioceses of the Church of England in 1991, and we called it Seeds of Hope . . . men and women, boys and girls, of every hue and ethnic group belong to the one race, the human race, all made in the image of God, and all are of unique worth in his sight.”
He wanted to “bury the word ‘racism’ . . . it often does not describe what you want to describe”.
Baroness Hamwee (Liberal Democrats) said: “There is a risk of confusing characteristics under this Bill with protected characteristics defined for a different piece of legislation.” For Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (Crossbench), “the term ‘personal characteristics’ without definition, is confusing”, particularly in the Explanatory Notes, which “uses the term ‘particular circumstances’ of individuals in apparent contradiction to ‘personal characteristics’. I am not sure that I understand the difference.”
Lord Marks did not believe “that the Sentencing Council has produced guidelines that depart from the principle that everyone is equal before the law. We in this House all believe in equality before the law.”
Summing up, Lord Timpson said: “This is a targeted and specific Bill which serves to protect the important principles of equality before the law.”
The Bill now returns to the Lords for the Committee Stage, from 19 May.
