Imposition consultation

Overview

The Sentencing Council is proposing to issue a new definitive guideline for imposition of community and custodial sentences.

The Sentencing Council is therefore seeking feedback from sentencers, justices’ clerks, legal advisers, prosecutors, defence representatives and other interested parties on proposals to replace the New Sentences - Criminal Justice Act 2003 definitive guideline 'see link below at' (PDF 1) with a guideline for the Imposition of Community and Custodial Sentences. The draft guideline can be found here: (PDF 2)

The consultation runs for six weeks from 14 January 2016 to 25 February 2016. This is a shorter period than is customary for Sentencing Council consultations.  The reasons for this are:

• the consultation relates to a concise, technical guideline and;
• we want to deliver improvements as soon as possible.

We will treat all responses as public documents in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act and we may attribute comments and include a list of all respondents’ names in any final report we publish. We may also share responses with the Justice Committee of the House of Commons.  If you wish to submit a confidential response, you should contact us before sending the response.  PLEASE NOTE – we will disregard automatic confidentiality statements generated by an IT system.

The Sentencing Council will review the responses to the questions and will use these to produce a definitive guideline.

You may find it helpful to have a copy of the draft guideline open as you work through this document.