Will the Tory pledge on child murderer jail terms have an impact?

Claim

Child murderers will spend the remainder of their days in prison and not be released from life sentences if the Conservatives are returned to power.

Background

The justice secretary, Robert Buckland, said the Tories would change the law to ensure an adult convicted of the premeditated murder of a child is sentenced to a “whole life” order, meaning they will never be eligible for parole. It is part of the party’s attempt to be seen to be “tough on crime” – one of the most important issues for both Tory and Labour voters after Brexit and health, according to the psephologist John Curtice.

There are 63 murderers being held in jail in England and Wales until their death, including Rosemary West, Levi Bellfield and Thomas Mair, who killed the Labour MP Jo Cox shortly before the EU referendum, according to the ministry of justice.

Under the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, judges can already hand down whole life tariffs as the starting point of their sentencing for child murderers but only if it involves “abduction of the child or sexual or sadistic motivation”.

The Tories say this is too restrictive and there should be no exceptions.

One person whose sentence would have been affected by the Tory proposal is Ian Huntley, who murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both aged 10, in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 2002.

He was sentenced one day after the 2003 act came into force but the judge ruled that he did not meet the “whole life” criteria. Huntley was instead given a minimum life sentence with no eligibility for parole until 2042.

Under the Tory plans, people such as Huntley would leave prison only after they died.

Reality

Child murder is rare. According to the latest Office for National Statistics figures, there were 67 victims of homicide under the age of 16 in the year ending March 2018. Homicide includes murder, manslaughter and infanticide.

A quarter of victims were killed by a parent or step-parent and previously analysis has consistently shown that children aged under one are disproportionately represented in national homicide figures.

The 2018 figure includes six children killed in the Manchester Arena terrorist attack, and no suspects had been identified in 28 cases. This leaves 33 cases with known killers or suspects, and some of these cases may have been manslaughter.

Verdict

A change in the law is unlikely to change the execution of justice in England and Wales because there are so few child murder cases. But it will deliver plenty of headlines that feed into the “tough on crime” election narrative.