The Sentencing Council should be empowered to do more to encourage public engagement with its consultations on draft guidelines. For example, it should explore whether it could use the approach of using online questionnaires adopted by the Sentencing Guidelines Commission in the Netherlands to encourage more responses from the public to their consultations. Online questionnaires would appear to be a more accessible form of engagement than a simple call for written evidence. We would also reco...

The Sentencing Council should be empowered to do more to encourage public engagement with its consultations on draft guidelines. For example, it should explore whether it could use the approach of using online questionnaires adopted by the Sentencing Guidelines Commission in the Netherlands to encourage more responses from the public to their consultations. Online questionnaires would appear to be a more accessible form of engagement than a simple call for written evidence. We would also recommend that any expansion in the scale of public engagement also includes the use of deliberative engagement tools similar to the public dialogue used as Type: conclusion | Number: 21 | Response status: under_consideration Government response: 21. Common Platform, launched in 2016, is a case progression system that records certain aspects of a criminal court case’s journey. It has been integral to the HMCTS Reform programme, and is currently live in 226 courts, equating to 100% of all criminal cou