Police and Justice Bill

It is one thing for an offender voluntarily to accept rehabilitation or reparation, but it is quite another thing to accept a punishment. The difference of degree makes this development alarming. Our second concern is that punitive cautions will lead to two-tier justice. Those without the means to pay the fine attached to a caution will have little choice but to face prosecution, while somebody who can afford to pay the fine will avoid conviction by paying. Our third concern is that conditional cautions might amount to soft justice. The Government have claimed that their purpose is to extend the means of delivering justice to low-level offenders. The Prime Minister has said that summary justice will be tough and hard, but the maximum fine will be £500—in practice, the figure may be less than that, because it will be no more than one quarter of the maximum fine which could have been imposed, if the offence had gone to a magistrates court. Lower penalties are built into the architecture of punitive cautions. Ordinary police cautions are already employed for serious offences. In 2004, 400 cautions were handed out for wounding or other acts of endangering life, and 451 were handed out for robbery. However, there is apparently no statutory limit to the offences to which punitive cautions could be applied. We do not know for what offences they might be available. That will be decided on the basis of guidance, which we have yet to see, from the Director of Public Prosecutions, approved by the Attorney-General. The current national guidelines for non-punitive conditional cautions allow for cautions to be used for serious offences that are triable even on indictment only, albeit in rare cases. That could include serious assaults. The danger is that once a punitive element is attached to conditional cautions, they will be used increasingly to deal with more serious offences that should be dealt with in the courts. That would follow the pattern of moves to summary justice that we are now seeing. The Government envisage that 30,000 cases will be dealt with by conditional cautions and a further 250,000 by the extension of fixed penalties. That extension could mean that serious crimes such as assaulting a police officer and mugging are punished by instant fines of up to £100. Conservative Members regard that as completely inappropriate. In Committee, the then Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety, the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), conceded that punitive cautions are a radical departure from the current law. So they are, but her justification for the extension of summary justice was wholly inadequate. She said:"““The legal system is complicated, time consuming and sometimes bureaucratic””.—[Official Report, Standing Committee D, 23 March 2006; c. 165.]" So it is, but that is a reason to reform the magistrates courts, not to shut courts out of the criminal justice process altogether. What is proposed is a fundamental transfer of sentencing responsibility from magistrates, and possibly even judges, where it properly belongs, to prosecutors. The development of summary justice has barely been debated in this House and should not be accelerated by a single, highly controversial clause in a Bill that has received little scrutiny because of the way in which the Bill has been timetabled. Conservative Members do not wish to support summary justice if it becomes soft justice, but the whole House should be concerned about supporting fast justice if it comes at the price of injustice. That is why we believe that the other place was right to strike conditional cautions from the Bill.