Clause 3 - Amount of penalty and form of penalty notice
Criminal Justice and Police Bill
12:15 pm
Mr Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey, Liberal Democrat)
We have now reached the debate on the amount of the penalty and the form of the notice. This is a simple probing amendment, suggesting that there should be a fixed maximum. As it stands, the clause allows the Secretary of State to specify the maximum penalty by order. It then qualifies the amount that can be specified by limiting it to a tariff linked to the maximum fine for which someone would be liable if convicted of the offence, and proposes that the fixed penalty notice should be no more than half of what the fine would be. It also goes on to other matters that we can debate later, including the provision that the order would need to be laid before Parliament on a negative resolution procedure, to be prayed against rather than affirmed.
I propose that there should be a maximum £50 fine to test what league we are in. I suspect that this is also why the Conservatives have proposed a maximum of £100. I am concerned about this for the reasons that I gave earlier. The danger of this system is that it seeks to penalise people, or put them in a position where they will be penalised, irrespective of their means. Although £100, £200 or £300 may be nothing to some people, it is a huge amount to others. The possibility of imposing a fine that is beyond the reasonable means of the person given the fixed penalty notice brings the whole system into disrepute.
What happens to someone who has no spare money at all? Let us take the extreme example of an asylum seeker who receives a voucher, has no money or access to money, is not allowed to work and receives no benefits. How does such a person get hold of the £50, £100 or £200? How does someone on the minimum amount of benefit suddenly find that money within the appropriate period, other than by borrowing it or stealing it? Because this system is so geared to the well-off, the person who can simply pay his way out of trouble, and so geared against anyone who cannot do that, we need an extremely low penalty. People who go on offending will get several very low penalties.
I ask Ministers to be absolutely clear about what the maximum is. As I do not have the information readily available, and the Minister has all his civil servants to provide the answers, could he tell us the current maximum fine for all the offences in the list are so that we can know exactly what we are talking about if the Government propose that there should be the ability to pay up to half the fine? If it is more than £100, it is certainly unacceptable. I hope that it is no more than £50.