Ancillary Orders Consultation

Overview

Introduction

What is this consultation about?

The Sentencing Council currently provides guidance on ancillary orders in various places on our website as well as within offence specific guidelines (usually at step 6 or 7). Most of this guidance is aimed at magistrates’ courts.

The Council is seeking to improve the consistency, accessibility and presentation of the current information and to provide more detailed guidance for both magistrates’ courts and the Crown Court.

What is the Sentencing Council?

The Sentencing Council is the independent body responsible for developing sentencing guidelines for the courts to use when passing a sentence. The Council consults on its proposed guidelines before they come into force and makes changes to the guidelines as a result of consultations.

Responding to the consultation

Through this consultation process, the Council is seeking views on the usefulness, accuracy and clarity of the proposed changes and anything else that you think should be considered.

In the following sections the proposed changes are outlined in detail and you will be asked to give your views. You can give your views by answering some or all of the questions below or by email to consultation@sentencingcouncil.gov.uk.

What else is happening as part of the consultation process?

This is a 12-week public consultation. The Council has not planned any consultation meetings but would be happy to arrange a meeting to discuss any of the issues raised if this would be helpful. Once the results of the consultation have been considered, the updated guidelines will be published and used by all courts.

Freedom of information

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. 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.

In addition, responses may be shared with the Justice Committee of the House of Commons.

Our privacy notice sets out the standards that you can expect from the Sentencing Council when we request or hold personal information (personal data) about you; how you can get access to a copy of your personal data; and what you can do if you think the standards are not being met. It is published on our website at: www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/privacy.