John Reid has been Home Secretary for barely eight months but it is already clear that his relationship with the judiciary is likely to be no more harmonious than that enjoyed by Charles Clarke or David Blunkett before him. As we report today, the response of the Council of Her Majesty's Circuit Judges and the Criminal Justice Committee of the Court of Appeal to the suggestions set out by the Home Office in its Making Sentencing Clearer document, published last November, has been scathing. Not only is the intellectual quality of some of the ideas put forward savaged but those representing Crown Court judges, in particular, can barely disguise their contempt for the broad thrust of policy. Ministers and the judiciary are once again at loggerheads.

This is in part because of the circumstances that produced the document. It was inspired by the case of Craig Sweeney, a convicted paedophile, who was told by a judge that he could, theoretically, be eligible for parole in only five years, although it was unlikely that he would be so fortunate in practice. Home Office ministers under the heat of public opinion expressed their strong disapproval of this sentence. The judiciary, on the other hand, felt that the judge had followed the existing rules properly (Sweeney’s guilty plea had automatically reduced his sentence by a third) and should not have been hounded by politicians for following rules that they themselves had set down.

The strong counter-attack that has been launched by the judiciary should not be dismissed as mere collective irritation. Some of the ideas floated by the Home Office were extremely controversial to the point of implausible. The notion that a judge should be in a position to add years to an individual sentence explicitly to increase “public confidence” in the courts does not chime with normal judicial practice. Another plan, that of indeterminate sentences, ranging, for example, from six years to life imprisonment, would hardly make sentencing clearer to the layman. And giving probation officers quasijudicial authority over those in their charge struck many as eccentric.

Ministers and judges would agree privately that sentencing has become unacceptably complicated and the consequence is inconsistencies in the tariffs handed down to offenders. Added to this is the system’s shameful secret: that a sentence can depend as much on the size of the prison population and spare capacity in cells as on the crime committed. There is a strong argument for making sentencing clearer, even if the measures that the Home Office rushed out last year have a back-of-an-envelope feel to them.

It does not help that dialogue between the executive and the judiciary seems to have broken down entirely. Both Mr Blunkett and Mr Clarke complained after they left office that they were unable to meet senior judges and explain their views and decisions. A strange interpretation of the separation of powers has taken hold, meaning that the Home Secretary and the judges engage in megaphone diplomacy rather than work together towards ends that would benefit each party. Mr Reid may try to ease these tensions by asking judicial organisations to make proposals of their own on sentencing, and not just criticise those of others.