Ministers will rush through an emergency law to block the ‘two-tier’ justice rules and are considering curtailing the powers of the Sentencing Council.
The Sentencing Council is facing a backlash from judges after introducing “cack-handed” guidelines that suggest offenders should receive more lenient sentences based on their ethnicity.
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, will introduce legislation next week that will override a new set of rules that critics warned would create a form of “two-tier” justice.
The guidance, which comes into effect on Tuesday, will tell judges to factor in the backgrounds of offenders when determining sentences. Judges will be told they should request a pre-sentencing report when an offender is a woman, pregnant, under 25, or from an ethnic, cultural or faith minority.
It was drawn up to fix the disparity in sentencing between ethnicities. A government study in 2017 found that, on average, violent Black offenders received sentences nearly twice as long as violent white offenders.
The Sentencing Council, an arm’s-length body of the Ministry of Justice, has already rebuffed a letter sent by Mahmood urging it to drop or delay the guidelines. Lord Justice William Davis, the chairman, said judges “must do all that they can to avoid a difference in outcome based on ethnicity”.
In response, Mahmood will rush an emergency bill through the Commons and the Lords this week to block the changes, but is unlikely to succeed before they come into effect. “We are moving as fast as possible to kill this,” a senior government source said.
The guidelines have enraged No. 10 and could lead to the powers of the Sentencing Council being curtailed in more sweeping legislation later this year.
One Labour MP has urged the government to abolish the Sentencing Council altogether. “All options are on the table,” the senior government source said.
Judges in the courts are split on the issue. But one source has told The Times that there is a growing view among some that the council “has completely lost the plot”.
According to the source, the probation service is already struggling to cope with its workload of providing “very basic” pre-sentencing reports, “never mind many more if this guidance ever gets going”.
The source said: “We need to get back to equality before the law rather than trying to treat different groups differently. Judges aren’t daft and look at any offender in the round, taking into account many, many factors before the final sentence is arrived at.”
The source added that many judges and magistrates were “thoroughly pissed off at the way things are going”.
Another legal source, while acknowledging the problem of higher average sentences for ethnic minorities, criticised the quango’s “cack-handed” approach.
“There has long been a perception that ethnic minorities receive higher sentences from judges. It is a real issue. But the way the Sentencing Council has tried to address it has been totally cack-handed,” the source said. “Their policy statement was extremely tactless and gives the public a misleading impression.”
However, the source claimed the guidelines were “not all that important” since judges tended to ignore pre-sentencing reports in any case. “Many judges think the pre-sentencing reports are a waste of time since they inevitably end up as a piece of advocacy on behalf of the defendant.”
The cost of producing the additional pre-sentencing reports could reach £17.5 million a year, according to analysis by the Conservatives.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said the principle of equality before the law was being “torn to shreds”.
“The taxpayer will be made to foot the bill for tens of millions of pounds for a justice system that is biased against white people and Christians,” he said.
George Grylls, Political Correspondent | Jonathan Ames, Legal Editor
Sunday March 30, 2025, 5.00pm BST, The Times