Police and Justice Bill

I wish to lend my party’s support to some of the concerns that underlie the amendments, if not the amendments specifically. We believe that limits on conditional cautions should be taken seriously. The Government favour what appears to be a considerable extension of summary power, and just before the local elections they slipped into the press—it was obviously intended to be a much bigger story, but was drowned by the events that engulfed the Government at the time—a further extension of the ability of police officers to issue on-the-spot fines for a range of offences. We look forward to hearing more about those proposals when they are properly announced to the House, and not by way of newspaper articles just before local elections. The common denominator in the extension of summary power is that the courts are being taken out of the equation. Fixed penalties and conditional cautions are both alternatives to prosecution and have generally related to minor matters. My party supported the introduction of conditional cautions when they were introduced, but if punishment is involved it should, in principle, be a matter for some form of court involvement. The punishment becomes a form of sentence and the Magistrates Association has expressed great concern about the fact that it is being entirely removed from oversight of the operation of conditional cautions, which will be a matter for prosecutors. When Lord Justice Auld, in his 2001 review of criminal courts, supported the introduction of a more general, formalised and conditional cautioning system, he also said:"““Any such scheme should, save for the most minor offences, be the responsibility of the CPS and subject to the approval of the court. Without the protection of the court’s approval, its use could be used or perceived as a ‘cop-out’ by the prosecution to avoid prosecuting cases that should be prosecuted, or of innocent criminals being at risk of pressure to accept onerous compromises to avoid prosecution, or of the rich being able to buy their way out of prosecution when the poor could not.””" The Magistrates Association points out that judges and magistrates take an oath, receive training, operate in public and have to announce the reasons for a sentence in open court—including any departure from sentencing guidelines—but the same does not apply to prosecutors. Where will the public accountability be for the operation of the conditional cautions? This direction of policy is described as the extension of summary power, but magistrates courts are summary courts. That is where summary justice should be administered. The proper response to the Prime Minister’s concern that the operation of justice has not been fast enough, which we share, would be to look at the operation of the court system and the Crown Prosecution Service. The recent NAO report pointed out that between that between 150,000 and 180,000 ineffective hearings every year were caused by the prosecution, the police and the CPS. We will not oppose the extension proposals in the Bill, although we have reservations about the sort of offences that will be involved. As the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) said, some of them will be quite serious, and we will watch this policy development with some concern. We need reassurance about the proposals flagged up in the media for a further extension of summary justice. We need to know the extent to which magistrates courts are being closed out of the sentencing process simply for the sake of more rapid justice.