Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (Youth Conditional Cautions: Code of Practice) Order 2009

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate. Our starting point is that the law-abiding majority want to see crimes, no matter how small, dealt with effectively and efficiently, and for a long time cautions have been part of that process. They allow the police to deal swiftly with low-level offending, freeing them up to spend more time on the front line and dedicate more time to more serious offences. They also free up court time for more serious offences. We believe that conditional cautions can have a positive effect in addressing the reasons behind some offences, perhaps particularly anti-social behaviour. The use of rehabilitative conditions, such as attending an alcohol awareness course, combined with a financial penalty, can help to tackle some of the root causes of the crime as well as delivering a fitting penalty. The Criminal Justice Act places no restrictions on the types of offences for which conditional cautions may be administered but we have made it clear, as has the Director of Public Prosecutions in his guidance, that they should be used only for low-level offending. Indeed, his guidance restricts their use to summary and certain either-way offences. A conditional caution cannot be administered for indictable-only offences, hate crimes, offences involving domestic violence and—here I am replying to the noble Baroness—offences using knives or offensive weapons. Youth conditional cautions put in place rigorous conditions to address bad behaviour while ensuring that the person admits his wrongdoing and makes amends to the local community by repairing damage that may have been caused, paying compensation or having restrictions placed on his movements. The noble Baroness spoke about a broken society and crime generally. I am sure that I do not have to remind her and the House that, for the first time in living memory and beyond, this is the first Government to have presided over a considerable fall in the number of crimes that have been committed. That is a proud record and contrasts clearly with the record of the previous Government. Before coming on to financial penalties, perhaps I may say that the point about youth cautions—this is something that I should have thought would be generally approved of across the House—is that they keep young people away from being prosecuted. However, you cannot keep young people away from being prosecuted for ever, and there is, as noble Lords will know, a hierarchy in youth offending. The reasons for our approach of saying that you could not get a conditional caution if you were a youth who already had a conviction were explained fully when the Bill was debated. The short answer is that there are various out-of-court disposals for a young person. There is a reprimand or a warning and a youth restorative disposal, which are not available for adults. The system is essentially hierarchical. Once the matter is so serious that a young person is convicted before a court, the other, less serious out-of-court disposals should, in our view, no longer be used. Such a system does not apply to adults. A criticism has been made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, that the new financial penalty, which will be piloted rather than brought in across the country, is somehow a step too far for prosecutors to be able to award. There has been no youth conditional caution until now, but for adults that same prosecutor has been able to make rehabilitative orders, which is something that the court would normally do, or reparative orders, which in some ways are punitive, such as payments of compensation, letters of apology, reparative unpaid work, restorative justice, and so on. All those matters are under the original conditional caution that the noble Lord said his party supported in the 2003 Bill. The prosecution is able to impose them, as it were, on someone prepared to accept a conditional caution. The noble Lord’s party was happy that the prosecutor should do that. It seems that the point beyond which it is not happy is when there is a financial penalty as well. Any defendant can refuse to be cautioned and can ask for his or her day in court. They are entitled to do that, which is an essential safeguard under our system. There is a limited discretion to set levels of financial penalties. They can be set either at a standard or mitigated level. I have already referred to the point about knives. Conditional cautions are paid or prosecution will follow. Penalty notices have issues with payment. Means are taken into account unlike what happens when there is a penalty notice in its stead. There are virtues in having conditional cautions as they prevent young people being prosecuted for offences. We do not want them to be prosecuted unless it is necessary. The youth conditional caution is not a new power of summary punishment, representing a fundamental constitutional change. We know that the police already issue fixed-penalty notices and other on-the-spot fines to offenders either on the street or at the police station. Others who accept these notices have to pay the set amounts required and are automatically diverted from prosecution in the courts when they do so. This is a logical extension of powers that already exist and which work pretty well. Of course, there will be many cases that can be dealt with only by the courts and, as I have said, the offender always retains the option to be prosecuted by the court rather than accept a caution. We believe that adult conditional cautions have worked pretty well so far. Parliament was happy that a youth conditional caution was one of the arrows that could be used to try to divert young people away from further crime. On that basis, I invite the House to accept these statutory instruments.