My Lords, again, I was not going to speak in this debate, but it is important for me to share my professional experience of this. I once worked with Professor Larry Sherman, who was a leading academic on restorative justice at the time, on a pilot scheme in the Metropolitan Police. In support of what the noble Viscount has just said, two major things came out of that pilot.
One was about victim satisfaction. Obviously, the process was voluntary—victims were not made to confront their attacker if they did not want to—but many felt so much safer, for example if they had been mugged in the street, having met their attacker face to face than victims who were attacked by some anonymous person. They understood more about their attacker from that face-to-face meeting, so it is good in terms of victim satisfaction. This may be counterintuitive to members of the Government who feel that the public might see it as a soft option, but victims really benefit from this.
The other thing was the impact on perpetrators. Larry Sherman rightly pointed out that many offenders, particularly young ones, appear in front of a court but they never say anything. They plead guilty. They have a solicitor or a barrister representing them. They sit at the back, disengaged from the whole process, which happens without them participating in it at all. It has no real impact on them—apart from the custodial sentence at the end of it, perhaps. They do not quite understand why they end up in custody because they have not participated in the process at all. On the contrary, with restorative justice, they sit opposite the victim and the victim tells the perpetrator how that offender made them feel. This has a salutary effect on the perpetrator and their future offending behaviour.
I just wanted to tell the Committee about that experience because other noble Lords have not mentioned those two aspects of restorative justice.