Police and Justice Bill

If it is put to the vote, I am going to support the Lords amendment. I regret that I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) when he says that there is a distinction of principle between fixed penalties and conditional cautions. They are the same. I agree that the sentence—if that is the word that my hon. Friend used—is variable in conditional cautions, but the general proposition is identical in each case. The prosecution, in the case of fixed penalties, is creating a situation whereby there is an adjudication of guilt, and the sentence is less important than the adjudication of guilt. So I am afraid that, as to the matter of principle, I cannot support my hon. Friend. I turn, however, to an issue where I am on the same side as my hon. Friend. Listening to the Solicitor-General, it became plain to me that, although he himself might not wish conditional cautions to be extended to a range of offences that you and I would class as serious, Madam Deputy Speaker, that remains a possibility. I accept that he spoke of an unwillingness on his part to see them extended to burglary, but it is clearly possible that, over time, they could be. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) referred to class A drugs and the carrying of a knife, as, indeed, did the Solicitor-General. My own feeling is that conditional cautions would be wholly inappropriate to those classes of offence. We have identified the possibility that conditional cautions will be extended much further than we are presently contemplating. We all know that the parliamentary controls on extending the range of offences to which such a penalty can apply are very limited. I assume—I have not checked—that it is done by statutory instrument. We all know that the order-making powers confer on the Executive very large discretion, and that we have very limited ability to constrain them. So for that reason, if the Lords amendment is put to the vote, I shall support it. I do not wish to see conditional cautions extended to, for example, burglary, carrying a knife or actual bodily harm.