Police and Justice Bill

The hon. Lady is right to an extent, but a person who was rich and able to pay might well accept a condition that imposed a financial penalty. It would be a way of committing a crime and getting away with it. A two-level system of punishment would be created, in which those who could not afford to accept a conditional caution would have to go through the criminal justice system, while those who could afford it might say, ““OK, I’ll pay. It was worth it.”” Amendment No. 33 retains the current legal position whereby the only conditions that may be applied to cautions are those intended to facilitate the rehabilitation of the offender, and to ensure that the offender makes reparation for the offence. The Bill proposes to allow conditions to be imposed on cautions when the object of the caution is punishment. That is not a small change. In Committee the former Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety, the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), acknowledged that the proposal was an ““innovative and radical departure”” from the current law. It will affect a great many people—an estimated 30,000 or so a year, according to the former Minister in Committee. This is not a matter of a few people in connection with virtually nothing; it will affect quite a lot of people, and a whole range of possibilities. The amendments would remove the proposed power to impose a fine as a condition of a caution, which would deal with the two-tier system that I described to the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Ms Johnson). In amendments Nos. 36 and 37, we seek to restrict the punitive conditions that could be imposed on a caution to those specified in the Bill. We also seek to prevent the Secretary of State from increasing by means of secondary legislation the maximum hours of attendance and the maximum fine that could be imposed. As the magistrates’ briefing suggests, the scope of the powers that the Secretary of State would assume under clause 12 opens up the possibility that more serious offences will be involved. I think that everyone assumes that the clause relates to extremely low-level offences, but that may not be so rigorously enforced. In Committee the former Minister sought to assure us that the provision would not be used in the context of more serious crime, citing guidance from the Director of Public Prosecutions on conditional cautions. I have looked at that guidance, and it does not contain an assurance that punitive conditional cautions will not be used to deal with more serious offences. As the former Minister herself has said, the most realistic safeguards against the use of the procedure to deal with serious offences are the restrictions on the severity of the conditions that may be imposed. That is why we propose that the Bill should prevent secondary legislation from being used to allow the imposition of more serious penalties. Amendment No. 38 seeks to place a 12-hour limit on the length of time for which a person arrested on the suspicion that he or she has breached a conditional caution can be held in custody. It would also prevent a person from being rearrested for the same suspected breach of a condition. The Minister said something about a falsehood being presented and an officer listening kindly to it. The Bill gives the police power to arrest someone suspected of breaching a conditional caution, and to detain that person indefinitely until they feel able to decide whether to charge or release him or her. Given the restricted purpose of the detention and the Government’s confidence that conditional cautions are to be used only for low-level offences, it seems entirely disproportionate for the police to be given an indefinite power of detention in such cases. That distinct disproportionality is highlighted when we consider that in the case of pre-charge detention when a person is suspected of having committed a criminal offence, the suspect can be detained for only up to 24 hours initially, with extensions of up to four days. For police gathering evidence within that time frame, deciding whether to charge the person is surely a harder task than deciding whether a condition of bail has been breached. Our concern is that the Government are trying to give the police the power to keep those suspected of breaching a conditional caution in custody for longer than those suspected of committing a criminal offence, which seems disproportionate. However, our amendment No. 38 acknowledges that some flexibility is required. and that it would be unworkable to impose a limit of one or two hours. We consider a 12-hour limit more than adequate, and a reasonable amount of time, given the low-level nature of the crimes that the Government say will fall within the framework of these conditional cautions. Our amendments Nos. 40 and 41 clarify the various options specified in proposed new sections 24A to 24C of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, making it clear that they would be available only when a prosecutor had decided that a condition of the caution had been breached without reasonable excuse. A person could therefore be released on bail before it had been determined whether they had breached the condition of their caution. We do not dispute the use of powers listed in proposed new section 24A(2) where such a breach has been established; however, our worry is that that section does not limit the use of the powers in that way, but enables them to be exercised purely by virtue of the fact that a person has been arrested on suspicion of a breach. Where a person accepts a conditional caution instead of prosecution, they enter into an agreement—a contract, of sorts—with the state. So it would be unnatural and unfair for the state then to change the terms of that agreement and to charge them with the original offence, without having established that the condition of the caution had been breached, and the offender had therefore broken their side of the deal. The same argument applies—