Does the Minister not agree that good law is about a combination of rules and discretion? I quite understand that he is here to advocate his new scheme and approach, which the Government have considered and think is the way forward, but why not have a little residual discretion for some of the examples that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, gave? The Minister said that a simple caution is really a bare warning but, occasionally, is not a bare warning better than nothing at all in terms of a police officer, in reality—sometimes underresourced, in difficult times—doing his job in the community?
Why do we have to be so rigid that we make a simple caution—which of course is not ideal and does not have the diversions and other things suggested—
impossible to give? In circumstance where there is a student who is annoyingly drunk but has not really harmed anybody—as in the example given—why not allow a bare warning rather than no warning and no action at all?