We welcome the Sentencing Council’s publication of its updated guidance: Imposition of community and custodial sentences guidance. In particular, we welcome the guidance that a pre-sentence report must be requested and considered for women and for Black and minoritised people.
This update follows a comprehensive and thorough consultation process, during which the Sentencing Council considered numerous responses from stakeholders, alongside research conducted by members of the judiciary, aimed at testing and informing the development of the guidelines.
Together with our partners in the Women’s Justice Reimagined Project (Women in Prison, Agenda Alliance, Criminal Justice Alliance, Muslim Women in Prison and Zahid Mubarek Trust), we have been working to raise awareness and drive change regarding the disproportionality and discrimination that Black, Asian, minoritised and migrant women face within the Criminal Justice System (CJS), including in sentencing. The need for change has been evidenced by successive reviews and reports, from the Corston Report into women in the CJS in 2007; to the 2017 Lammy Review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System; Double Disadvantage (Agenda and Women in Prison, 2017) and Counted Out (Prison Reform Trust, 2017) reports, which have repeatedly highlighted the significant inequalities faced by Black and minoritised women in relation to the justice system.
At Hibiscus, we see the profound impact of this on our service users throughout their CJS journey. For instance, in the last 18 months we supported over 150 women appearing before Westminster Magistrate Courts. Amongst these group of women only ten had a pre-sentencing report requested by the judge.
As stated by Baroness Helena Kennedy KC in an interview on The Today Show this morning (6th March 2025), that “a well-informed court is always going to do better in its outcomes. It’s always going to provide a more just outcome if it knows enough about the person who’s coming in front of them.” We believe it would be considerable oversite for any court to be making decisions as profound as handing down a criminal sentence without information so integral to a person’s offence.
Baroness Kennedy went on to explain:
“We know that [a two-tier justice system already exists] because of the disproportionate numbers of people from certain communities who end up in prison… The reality is that sometimes our system works in skewered ways and it’s good for judges to know more about the people who are coming in front of them and to know about their background, and so reports are a valuable thing… It’s about basing the system on real evidence of where there are failures and knowing more helps to get better outcomes.”
Responding to the Sentencing Council’s Imposition of community and custodial sentences announcement, Hibiscus Head of Policy and Public Affairs, Elizabeth Jiménez-Yáñez said:
A Black or minoritised migrant woman in the CJS is more likely than not to be a victim/survivor of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG). She is also disproportionately likely to have been affected by other environmental factors, such as poverty and lack of stable housing, which have left her unable to meet her basic needs. These factors must be taken into account by the courts. We therefore support the guidance that a pre-sentence report should normally be considered necessary for women and for Black and minoritised people. This represents a promising step towards a fair justice system.