I beg to move amendment No. 518, in

clause 151, page 84, line 22, at end insert

'which shall include as deputy chairman the Secretary of State for Home Department, or a person whom he nominates in his stead, and the chairman of the appropriate committee of the House of Commons, or a person whom he nominates in his stead, who, together with the Lord Chief Justice, shall comprise the Executive Committee of the Council'.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments:

No. 519, in

clause 151, page 84, line 24, at end insert

'and the chairman of the appropriate committee of the House of Commons.'.

No. 520, in

clause 151, page 84, line 25, leave out subsection (4) and insert—

'(4) The other members of the council will include at least one of each of the following—

(a) a Lord Chief Justice of Appeal;

(b) a judge of the High Court;

(c) a Circuit judge;

(d) a District judge;

(e) a District judge (Magistrates' Courts);

(f) a lay justice;

(g) a Police Officer;

(h) a Probation Officer;

(i) a Prison Governor;

(j) a representative of a Victims' Organisation;

(k) a representative of the Business Community;

(l) a teachers' representative;

(m) three lay members of the public one of whom shall be over the age of 60 and one of whom shall be under 18;

(n) a representative of exoffenders' institutions;

(o) a local government/crime and disorder partnership representative;

(p) a legal professional, alternately a barrister or solicitor;

(q) a social services representative.'.

No. 521, in

clause 151, page 84, line 31, leave out subsection (5).

No. 541, in

clause 153, page 85, line 21, leave out line 21 and insert—

'(2) The Secretary of State, Lord Chancellor or Chairman of the appropriate committee of the House of Commons must first propose to the Sentencing Advisory Panel that it prepares a report and recommendation prior to any consideration of the Council—'.

No. 638, in

clause 153, page 86, line 17, at end add—

'(ii) the appropriate committee of the House of Commons.'.

No. 687, in

clause 252, page 138, line 8, at end insert

' ''the appropriate committee of the House of Commons'' means any select committee of the House of Commons which the House of Commons may from time to time designate by resolution to be the appropriate committee for the purposes of this Act;'.

I hope that these amendments enjoy the same support as the previous group. We have reached what I believe is the most important part of the Bill, as it introduces the Sentencing Guidelines Council. I may take a little time to introduce the amendments and explain their consequences, so I shall speak briefly on later points, but it is important to put a few things about sentencing on the record.

First, ordinary people—the public, whom the criminal justice system is supposed to serve—do not have the foggiest idea of how sentencing works. It is incumbent on Committee members to do their bit to persuade the Government to accept certain sensible reforms—I hope to have gained consensus on them—so that members of the public can understand what sentencing is about and what individual sentences mean.

We all hear from our constituents, who tell us, ''So-and-so got off with a slap on the wrist'' or ''So-and-so was convicted of an offence, but he'll be out in a few months. It doesn't matter how serious the

offence is.'' There is a lack of faith in the criminal justice system, and much of it stems from our inability to reconnect sentencing with the public. The amendments are designed to allow anyone to navigate a route through the criminal justice system and to understand sentencing.

I am grateful that hon. Members from both sides of the Committee have signed up to the amendments, and they have done so because they want to progress the debate and to influence the Government and the judiciary. I fully accept that not all of them have signed up to every dot and comma, and most want to facilitate the debate and to help the Government achieve some reconciliation with the judiciary and Parliament on the issue of sentencing.

It is pretty obvious from recent events that the Lord Chief Justice's pronouncements about first-time burglars just before Christmas have prompted a debate. They were distorted by the media and by the reaction to them, but—if I may be slightly critical—he should have anticipated the way in which they would be interpreted. With a little more care and sensitivity, and a slightly more obvious presentation, he could have said what he did without changing the legal aspect one iota. He could have put things in such a way that people would have understood him, but fear and a lack of trust led the public and the media to react unfortunately, to put it mildly. Had he had the benefit of a wider sounding board—of others giving him sensible and rational advice before he made his pronouncements—the furore that broke out just before Christmas could have been mitigated.

In the same way, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary—again for all the right reasons—responded to the recent terrible murders of two young ladies in Birmingham with a reflex, saying that people who carry guns should go to prison for fives years mandatorily. That was a reflex that I shared. Regardless of whether it was right or wrong, however, I hope that all of us, and perhaps even the Home Secretary, will say after further careful reflection that we should not initiate new sentencing guidelines or statute law in that way. We should perhaps take a more steady, careful and rational approach, so that we avoid some of the pitfalls that have become apparent since the Home Secretary's announcement.

Parliament is the third arm of the system. Frankly, we are just icing on the cake and part of the ritual of government, rather than a serious voice in a careful and constructive debate about sentencing. I do not say this to flatter hon. Members, but I have sat through many of our sittings, and the expertise and ability of members of this Committee alone has been a revelation. They have brought to bear experience from their constituencies, from the magistrates bench and from a lawyer's point of view. The House of Commons therefore has a part to play in the broad field of sentencing.

There is good will on all sides—within the judiciary, the Government and Parliament—to put the issue in the right context. If we share the responsibilities and talk to one another, we can come to satisfactory arrangements that accommodate every point of view

and result in more effective sentencing. Having gone through a joint process, we shall all be the wiser. Above all, the public will have faith that things will not have been done in some dusty, judicial, archaeological excavation, because of a reflex, as the result of a push by the media to respond to a particular horrendous crime, or because MPs are sitting in the House and cannot be bothered to take such issues seriously. All those stereotypes are wrong, and all three elements, including ourselves, have to take the issue seriously. It is evident from the support for the amendments in favour of a restructured Sentencing Guidelines Council that people are beginning to do so.

My reservation about signing up to the hon. Gentleman's amendment is that it does not include the phrase ''representative of the community''. Does he agree that the real problem with the clause is that subsection (4) states:

''A person is not eligible to be appointed . . . unless he is a Lord Justice of Appeal, a judge of the High Court, a Circuit judge, a District Judge . . . a lay justice''?

Few women or members of ethnic communities are members of those judicial strata, so the council will not be representative of the community. That is my problem with the clause.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I do not seek to excuse parliamentary officials or draftsmen, but one could argue that the clause was drafted almost in a different age, given the events that have taken place since the Woolf judgment and subsequently. I hope that we are all a little wiser now and can use this opportunity to bring it up to date. It was probably drafted five or six months ago, but it could have been drafted 100 years ago. It is wholly lacking in relevance to those—all of us on this Committee—who want to bring together a coalition of interest between Parliament, the judiciary and Government. The hon. Lady's point is extremely helpful.

In formal discussions with Members on the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat Front Benches and with my hon. Friend the Minister, there is immense open-mindedness as to how to proceed. Everyone wants us to get it right, so I shall not press any of the amendments to a vote. My intention is not to divide the Committee, but to create a broader unity in order to empower our Government representatives to go away and conduct any negotiations that they feel are necessary to reassure the judiciary and our parliamentary and Government colleagues that the Committee is finding a way forward on sentencing, rather than representing any vested interest or partisan group.

Amendment No. 518 is designed to make it absolutely clear that in future sentencing must pull together the three arms: judiciary, legislature and Executive. It makes it clear that the chairman of the Sentencing Guidelines Council shall be the Lord Chancellor and that it shall be his ultimate responsibility to ensure that the council works effectively. It also makes it clear—I am open to alternative formulations—that the formal deputy shall

be the Secretary of State or Home Secretary or his or her nominee and the second deputy the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs or the relevant Committee or his nominee.

All three of the vital arms will be represented on the Sentencing Guidelines Council. We want to force them, rather than using megaphone diplomacy, leaks to newspapers and pronouncements on the television, to sit down together. That is the least that we can expect of those three eminent people, who represent far broader interests. The provision is symbolic, but the symbolism is extremely important.

Amendment No. 519 is intended to allow the Chairman of the relevant House of Commons Committee to be included in subsection (3). That is to allow the House to decide whether it wants the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee—that would be my choice—or the Chairman of the new Select Committee on the Lord Chancellor's Department to become involved. Perhaps the latter would take the role as the nominee of the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee. That is an attempt to keep things broad, and to permit flexibility and allow the Minister to make the negotiations.

Will the hon. Gentleman clarify two points? Under the clause the Lord Chief Justice would be the chairman of the council; would that still be the case under the amendment or would it be the Lord Chancellor? Secondly, under the clause the members of the council are to be appointed by the Lord Chancellor. Are the amendments intended to provide that the more-widely constituted body would also be appointed by him, so that the Lord Chancellor would choose, for example, the representatives of the business community and teachers' and victims' organisations?

Perhaps I inadvertently misled the Committee. The chairman of the sentencing council should be the Lord Chief Justice under the amendments. If I said that it was the Lord Chancellor, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

I think that the Lord Chancellor should continue to be the person who makes appointments to the sentencing council, but amendment No. 520 specifies the groups that should be represented. The Lord Chancellor would no doubt take advice, as he currently does, on the relevant matters, and make sure that the appointee was someone representative. Perhaps there is a suggestion that someone might be intent on packing the body. I might digress here and talk about wholly elected or wholly appointed bodies; that might not be a good precedent, in the context of a discussion about the Lord Chancellor, so I shall pass quickly on.

The people suitable to represent, for example, victims' organisations, would probably be pretty obvious, and I hope that the advice given to the Lord Chancellor would be straightforward. However, if any members of the Committee think that safeguards or more clarity are needed, they should

make that contribution in debate, so that the Minister can listen.

In addition to advocating broadening the composition of the sentencing council, and ensuring that it publishes guidelines of the standard bands for each sentence—which I wholly agree with—does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is important that those bands should be debated every year on the Floor of the House? Perhaps that should happen more than once a year, because so many sentences will need to be considered. Members of Parliament, who are accountable to their electorates, could then discuss them. At the moment, all that we can do is discuss maximums and, occasionally, minimums. There would be no harm, with regard to accountability, in debating the guidelines and the sentencing bands that the council would produce.

That is a helpful idea, but I warn the hon. Gentleman to be a little careful about wanting to involve the Floor of the House, instead of the appropriate Select Committees. I do not say that there should not be a debate, but both the Opposition and the Government would whip hon. Members in debates on the Floor of the House. We should at all costs avoid the House of Commons becoming involved in a bidding war about sentencing levels, in which someone argues for a standard sentence of one year for a first-time burglar, then someone else suggests two and someone else three. There will always be a more extreme case, so we must be sensitive to making matters worse. That would not preclude discussing the ideas further in a later group of amendments so that the hon. Gentleman and I stay in order. We both wish to discuss how we would best deal with those matters in the parliamentary context.

I am not suggesting that there should be a line-by-line vote through the House of Commons. However, there are many examples of debates that take place in the House. For example, we have a debate on the Public Accounts Committee, on outstanding reports or on estimates. There should be an opportunity for elected MPs with constituency cases to discuss in the House what sentences this grand body of men and women will come up with.

Order. The guidelines on sentencing and allocation come later in the Bill. It would be better to debate those issues then. We should remain within the debate on clause 151 and the amendment.

The hon. Gentleman made some sensible points that, as you say, Mr. Illsley, we shall come to. We are trying to improve the situation; making it worse is not what we are about. However, we shall come to the matter later.

Amendment No. 520 is about the composition of the sentencing council. The amendment has retained all those who are specified as being members of the sentencing council. The amendment would not throw anybody off the council; additions would be made to make the sentencing council a wider sounding-board than it would be if it was simply composed of the judiciary. Unfortunately, a closed committee of judiciary would—no doubt for all the wrong reasons—be perceived on the outside as being a

closed shop of judges advising the Lord Chancellor. There are no doubt other ways in which that can take place. However, those individuals would remain on the council but the sounding-board would be broadened. The judicial view would be leavened by the involvement of those other people that the amendment specifies. Some people perhaps should not be on the list, but I am sure that hon. Members can think of at least two or three who should be on it. Indeed, hon. Members did suggest representatives while I was drafting the amendment, for which I am grateful.

Other people may have a contribution to make, either on behalf of this place or on behalf of the Government. More pertinently, my list includes people such as a serving police officer and a serving prison governor—people who see what sentencing really means and feel that dislocation between the ordinary person and the passing of sentences. Those people may help to bring us all back together so that we can all work together to achieve an effective sentencing council.

I always have a difficulty with lists such as this. People who are left out feel aggrieved and offended. I suggest that the hon. Gentleman give consideration—perhaps the Minister would also give more consideration in his reply—to saying that the sentencing council should include an additional nine, 11 or 13 lay members who, taken as a whole, are representative of the community. That would be very helpful.

That is a very helpful and sensible suggestion from the hon. Lady. For example, departmental officials would automatically think that the police representative should come from the Association of Chief Police Officers. I automatically think of the Police Federation. Perhaps they should take it in turns, or perhaps we should not even specify who should represent the police.

My list is to show that the Committee feels—I hope—that the council's membership should be broader than merely the judiciary. We should not attempt, in any way, to tie the Minister's hands in any negotiations that he may need to hold after this debate in Committee in order that he can come up with perhaps 13 extra individuals.

We are saying symbolically that the sentencing council would benefit from having in its membership a serving probation officer who is used to doing pre-sentence reports daily and a representative of victims' organisations who can interject where appropriate about the way in which victims perceive a particular form of sentencing. Imagine if a representative of victims' organisations had been sitting with Lord Woolf just before Christmas on the back of the Court of Appeal case. That individual would have contributed some very sensible advice to the, by and large, sensible message that Lord Woolf finally gave in that case.

It being twenty-five minutes past Eleven o'clock, The Chairman adjourned the Committee without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned till this day at half-past Two o'clock.