My Lords, this has been a wide-ranging debate. When the right reverend Prelate introduced it, he made a general plea in favour of cautions and on why his amendment was appropriate. He spoke of the benefits of cautions and what they need to be effective, and of the revolving door of crisis and crime and of a holistic approach. He particularly gave the example of women offenders, for whom a holistic approach is appropriate to reduce reoffending. Then he went on to give examples of why quite a lot of cautions fail—by giving too many conditions. My experience, through following both cautions and sentences through court, is that the more conditions you put in place, even if they are in place for the best of reasons, the more likely you are to have a breach and to re-enter that cycle, coming back to court or to the police when conditions are breached.
My central point is that out-of-court disposals are a difficult area. The Government and previous Governments have a lot of experience in trying to come up with an appropriate regime for out-of-court disposals. As we have heard on the Bill—I agree with pretty much all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick—we have another cautions regime, which we hope will work in some way. I particularly noted the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, about the need to see draft regulations or a draft code of practice to ensure consistency across the country.
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I close by drawing an analogy between the youth regime and the adult regime we are talking about here. We have seen far more extensive introductions of cautions in the youth regime over the last few years, which has seen far fewer youths being brought to court. That is possibly a good thing, but the consequence is that the youths who come to court are often charged with far more serious offences. That may be right in some sense, but we see repeated interventions for youths with conditional cautions, simple cautions or other out-of-court disposals, a multitude of times, until eventually the youths end up in youth court.
I support the overall objective of having an effective caution regime, but I share the scepticism of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, about the reasons for putting this regime in place. One should not be misled into thinking that any particular regime would immediately have better results than previous regimes or the current regime.