Good morning, convener, and Mr Johnson. Thank you for giving the Sentencing Council the opportunity to speak to you today. I will come to Mr Johnson’s question in a second, but I thought that it might be helpful to set the context for any contribution that the Sentencing Council can make by explaining a little about the council and its functions.
As you know, the Sentencing Council was formed in late 2015. It has three statutory objectives, which are to promote consistency in sentencing across Scotland, to assist in the development of sentencing policy and to promote greater awareness and understanding of sentencing. The council’s functions include the development of guidelines, conducting research and providing general information on sentencing.
At present, the council’s focus is on the development of sentencing guidelines. So far, general guidelines are under development. The first guideline, which has been consulted on and is about to be presented to the High Court for consideration, is on the principles and purposes of sentencing. Separately, there is a sentencing process guideline, which is shortly to be issued for judicial and then public consultation. We are also in the process of developing a sentencing young people guideline.
We have also begun work on two offence-specific guidelines—on death by driving offences and environmental and wildlife crimes—and research into the sentencing of sexual offences has begun. That will inform our decision on whether to develop a guideline in that area.
In addition to guidelines, several projects aimed at improving awareness and understanding of sentencing have been delivered, principally through the creation of the council’s website. The website provides comprehensive information about all the different kinds of sentencing, interactive case studies, explanatory videos, a myth buster and a jargon buster. Those are all open resources that can be accessed and used by agencies, practitioners, non-governmental organisations and any other interested party, for training purposes or public information.
We have not carried out extensive work on the implications of the present bill. However, we hope that we will be able to provide a little assistance, and perhaps I can assist Mr Johnson with his question. As we understand it, the bill is designed to make available to a sentencer who is considering a community payback order the opportunity to impose, as part of that order, electronic monitoring for a period of up to three years. That is an extension of what is currently available to sentencers, in relation to which the maximum is one year.
Community payback orders are, generally speaking, sentences that are designed to provide an appropriate level of punishment and to promote rehabilitation through support in the community. We noted that the policy memorandum that was published with the bill explained, among other things, that the opportunity to impose a greater degree of control over offenders in the community might make the use of electronic monitoring more appealing to sentencers.
The court principle—that is, that sentences must be fair and proportionate—incorporates the principle of parsimony, which is that sentences should be no more severe than is necessary to achieve the appropriate purpose of sentence in each given case. Therefore, the council hopes that a sentencing option that gives the sentencer more flexibility in applying that principle of parsimony will contribute to the individual sentencing purpose being achieved.
In the case of a community payback order, that purpose is likely to be rehabilitation, as well as the provision of a suitable level of public protection and punishment by restriction of liberty. In other cases, of course, the sentencing purposes of public protection or punishment might determine that only a custodial sentence can appropriately achieve the purpose. In such cases, the opportunity to impose a longer period of monitoring might not be sufficient.
It is obviously important that each case is assessed according to its own facts and that a fair and proportionate sentence is identified. However, in the council’s view, flexibility in the range of non-custodial sentences that are available is likely to be of benefit and likely to achieve the bill’s objective of making electronic monitoring more appealing to sentencers as an alternative to the imposition of custodial sentences.
We therefore expect that the opportunity to take advantage of a sentencing tool that has not been available until now will permit sentencers to conclude that some cases that might otherwise have been dealt with by the imposition of a custodial sentence can in future be dealt with by a new form of community payback order, which includes restriction of liberty for a period of up to three years. The individual circumstances that will determine whether a sentencer selects a sentence of that sort in any given case will of course vary from case to case, and all circumstances will be different.