Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 94: Page 9, line 26, at end insert- ““( ) Subject to subsection (3), the amount shall be commensurate with the financial resources of the offender.”” The noble Baroness said: We now approach the issue of conditional cautions from a more practical and different angle. The amendment would require that any fine imposed on a conditional caution should reflect the financial resources available to the offender. The danger is simply that, without this guarantee, the option of a conditional caution could in some circumstances be only for the rich—one law for the rich, to escape a court appearance—while the poor would be left without such a choice. The Minister in another place sought to argue that the requirement that the suspect consents to the caution should deal with that concern. When we broached the first relevant group of amendments on Tuesday evening, the noble and learned Lord immediately referred to the fact that conditional cautions are imposed only with consent. We think that that can be a rather ingenuous argument because it misses the point. The person who cannot afford to pay a fine has no choice. They cannot accept a conditional caution. They have to go to court. By contrast, those with financial means will be able to buy their way out of a court appearance. The CPS conditioning code of practice—I am sorry, I mean cautioning code of practice; perhaps it was a Freudian slip as the code is also conditioning—makes it abundantly clear that the process for agreeing to conditional cautions would not make any allowances for the ability to pay a fine. The noble and learned Lord looks puzzled. He may well be able to give a much better explanation of the code of practice than I can as it is in his immediate domain. But I quote from guidance issued by the Secretary of State under Sections 22 to 27 of the Criminal JusticeAct 2003. It states: "““There should not be any bargaining with the offender over the conditions: if he does not accept them in full, he should be prosecuted””." The amendment simply seeks to address the risk of a two-tier system arising from the ability to impose fines on conditional cautions. It would require the offender’s financial resources to be taken into account when setting the level of the fine. That would recognise that not all offenders have the same financial resources and ability to pay a fine. I beg to move.