Police and Justice Bill

According to answers to my parliamentary questions, the police cautioned 807 such people in the past two years alone, mostly for taking indecent photographs of children. Given the nature of paedophiles and their tendency to reoffend, it is a fair assumption that some and probably many of those 807 people went on to commit further offences, which may or may not have been detected. Those offences clearly damage our innocent young children. The use of cautions in those circumstances, rather than the public trial that such people deserve, helps them to reoffend and therefore damages our children. All hon. Members know that those offences destroy children and families. I put it to the House that, if only one of those 807 people went on to reoffend—the House must remember that they have admitted their offence and that they are guilty of an offence against innocent children—the use of the caution was wrong in all cases and should not have been used. Cautions should be used generally only where, first, the offence, which must be admitted in full by the criminal, has only minor consequences for either individual victims or society at large and, secondly, where offenders are unlikely to reoffend, where the caution will do the job of pulling them up, showing them that what they did was wrong and preventing them from going on to reoffend. Clearly, neither of those two tests is usually met in the case of paedophile activity. Instead of leaving the decision about whether or not to caution to a police officer, who may or may not be an expert in dealing with serious child abuse, Parliament—which should protect our children, not the abusers—should prevent the use of cautions for paedophile activity in all but truly exceptional cases. New clause 1(2) sets out the exceptional case, where the officer believes that the offender is unlikely to commit further offences, but that exception would not normally apply. Once paedophiles are apprehended, they should be put through the courts—the right place for such serious offences, thus ensuring that the public are aware of their proclivities and giving parents in the locality a better chance of defending their innocent children by keeping an eye on the offenders. When the subject was debated before in the House, the argument was advanced that it is sometimes easier to secure a confession and therefore to impose a caution than to secure a conviction. It was argued that it is therefore sometimes possible to pin down someone as an offender by offering a caution, when they might escape conviction if the matter was taken before the courts. That is a serious argument against taking people who abuse children before the courts, and I should like to address it very briefly now. The offence and its consequences are so serious that I believe that, on balance, a trial in court is the right way forward in almost all cases. The use of summary powers that the Bill generally seeks to extend is not appropriate for such particularly obnoxious offences. I strongly suspect anyway that an offence is only admitted and a caution only accepted by paedophiles when they know that the evidence against them is so compelling that they would be found guilty, since the cautioned criminal will be entered in any event on to the sex offenders register and no reasonable person would accept that lightly without the very high probability or almost certainty of being found guilty at trial. I am sure the House will be surprised that the use of cautions for such offences has increased almost tenfold over the past few years. I want that trend to be reversed. I want paedophiles to get the justice that they deserve and our children to get the protection that they deserve. I hope that hon. Members will support my new clause, which would let the police, the courts and the public know that the House takes the matter very seriously and is intent on giving maximum protection to our innocent children.