This was something that the government announced over the weekend, and it’s a pretty big reform proposed to the criminal law, particularly to the sentencing part of it. At the moment, if you go to court charged with a criminal offence, you can rely on what is called “prior good character.” So, if you don’t have a criminal record, for example, or you have a pretty substantial history of doing good things in the community, you can get a reference from people who know you. They can talk about things ranging from the sort of mundane—”He always seemed like a decent person to me; I’ve never seen him do anything bad; he doesn’t lose his temper”—through to “He or she has been involved in really amazing good works.” They’re pretty common in most criminal matters, unless, of course, you don’t have good character—and there are certainly people like that appearing before the court. But look, what the government has done is respond to a Sentencing Council report where the Sentencing Council, by a majority (there were some dissenting views on it), recommended that good character be abolished. That doesn’t mean that what we see in character references will no longer go into evidence in many cases, because two things that are highly relevant in sentencing—and we’re not proposing to change this—are what they call “prospects of rehabilitation” and what is called in the criminal law “the prospects of reoffending.” A lot of the evidence that is relevant at the moment to good character is also relevant to those two things, and that sort of makes sense. You judge someone on their prior performance in terms of trying to estimate how they might behave in the future. So this won’t lead to the complete abolition of any mention of the person’s past. There just won’t be this additional factor. In the view of the Sentencing Council—and the government has adopted this view—it was sort of confusing, because once you look at the prospects of reoffending, once you look at the prospects of rehabilitation, and you take into account prior history when looking at those things, what the Sentencing Council said was: “Well, what is really left for good character to do? Isn’t it sort of exhausted at that point?” And what they were fundamentally concerned about was that you were getting into some sort of moral accounting exercise, where you’re like, “Oh well, they’ve done all this good stuff in the past, so therefore what they did here is not quite as bad.” And I think people were sitting in courtrooms—victims and such—and just being a bit offended by that. It’s not a trade-off. So there was concern about that. Now, the dissenting view in the Sentencing Council sought to make some other uses for character, and say that it’s relevant to assessing how wrong the act might have been. In the criminal law, they talk about “instinctive synthesis,” which is the process of sentencing where you kind of put all the factors together and you just sort of come up with the outcome. And in their view, you need to really understand the person’s history to do that. So, I personally think there has been some misuse of character. I think it’s been given too much weight in some cases, particularly for people who are pretty advantaged, who have lots of powerful friends—maybe ones that write letters. And we can think of some famous cases where famous people wrote references for people, and that can sometimes have probably too much influence in the court. I don’t think that’s happened by and large, I must say, but those are the concerns that the government is responding to.
-as per Radio interview, 2 Feb 2026