Government to table law overriding sentencing rules

The government will introduce legislation to Parliament this week to override independent guidance on how offenders from ethnic minorities should be sentenced.

It comes after the Sentencing Council refused a request from Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood to reconsider its new instructions for judges.

The guidelines, which come into effect on Tuesday, say judges should commission reports for offenders from certain minority groups that look at their background and circumstances before deciding their sentence.

It has prompted accusations of a "two-tier" justice system, with Mahmood arguing it "amounts to differential treatment" because pre-sentence reports were encouraged for some but not others.

Legislation will be tabled this week that government sources said would "surgically" remove that particular section of the new guidelines.

They will hope to rush it through both Houses of Parliament. But a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) source admitted "there is no world in which those guidelines don't come into effect" as planned on Tuesday.

The new law will "be very focused on the specific guidelines and specifically the bits we don't like about them," the source said.

In a letter to the Sentencing Council, an independent public body responsible for developing guidelines, Mahmood said it should be "a question of policy" when it came to who received pre-sentence reports.

She told the council's chair Lord Justice William Davis: "I think it is vital that the decisions taken on this question should be accountable to the public, both in parliament and at the ballot."

She added: "The appearance of differential treatment before the law is particularly corrosive."

The council argues its new guidance is intended to remedy a "disparity in sentence outcomes" between white and non-white offenders.

In correspondence published on Friday, Lord Justice Davis said the council had decided the guidelines "did not require revision" and had been received positively during a four-month consultation under the previous Conservative government.

Sources in the MoJ said the row "does raise questions about the Sentencing Council and democratic deficit".

They indicated wider changes could come in a sentencing bill later this year after the former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke's ongoing review is finished.

Exactly what those changes will be about is unclear.

"That requires more thinking," the source said. "We will go away and do that."

One possibility is a greater role for ministers or Parliament in scrutinising the Sentencing Council - something one figure described as "a democratic lock" on its powers.

Lord Falconer, the Labour peer and former justice secretary under Tony Blair, said he agreed the new guidance "gives the impression of an unfair system".

But he warned against "emergency legislation" to bypass the council.

He said the government should launch a consultation that also examined why those from minority backgrounds received harsher sentences.

"I wouldn't be in favour of emergency legislation before the consultation," he told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

"The reason I'd be against emergency legislation at this stage is because I would take the view that the government would get themselves into a very difficult position if every time they disagreed with the council's views, they had emergency legislation."

Robert Jenrick, the Conservative shadow justice secretary, said anything the government did now was "too little too late".

"Shabana Mahmood has lost control of the justice system," he said, claiming she would be presiding over a justice system which was "biased against white people and Christians - and that costs the taxpayer tens of millions".

"Confidence in the criminal justice system has been blown apart because of her incompetence," he said.