Clause 18 - Conditional cautions
Criminal Justice Bill
10:30 am
Mr Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey, Liberal Democrat)
I welcome the Solicitor-General, who will respond to the debate on this important part of the Bill. She has been courteous in making herself available and letting us have supporting documents, as well as supportive of the idea of conditional cautions. I hope that she will consider the amendments in the same spirit, because we want the system to work well.
The amendments relate to subsection (1), which states that people who are authorised—I shall return to who that is later—
''may give a conditional caution to a person aged 18 or over''
if certain requirements are met. Those requirements are set out in clause 19, which we shall come to.
The background to the amendment is that the use of cautions has declined because they have been regarded as less effective, often by police, and society at large regards them as inadequate. The amendment would build back in another stage of options. The caution simpliciter would be at the bottom of the league of those responses that count but do not put a person on the criminal justice ladder. Conditional cautions would give people a telling off and require them to do something as a result, and if they did not, certain consequences would follow. People are always shouting for bigger penalties and more effective remedies, and conditional cautions give us a range of such remedies.
Amendment No. 141—again, I am happy to discuss the drafting—seeks to make it clear that conditional cautions are in respect of an offence, but in place of
criminal proceedings. We talk about the criminal justice system being weighed down with paperwork, and the Solicitor-General and I have sat through too many meetings discussing the fact that there are not enough police in our borough, and we have the same discussion again this year. The problem arises partly because officers spend so much time doing paperwork, and I am keen to ensure that we do not lock everyone who needs to be rebuked into a long and bureaucratic criminal justice process.
People must be clear about the principle. We are talking about a way of getting people to undertake to behave themselves that does not involve giving them a criminal record. We must be careful about giving criminal records to people as they are growing up and going through a stage of challenging society, because they are not really criminals in the wider sense. Such people might get carried away after a 21st birthday party on a Friday night and, ideally, we should try to keep them out of the criminal justice system. That is what amendment No. 141 is about. It would make it clear that conditional cautions were to be used instead of, rather than as the first step in, criminal proceedings.
Amendment No. 142 would ensure that a code of practice set out the conditions that could be applied to a caution. They could be varied in the light of experience, but the range must be known in advance. They need not be so tightly defined as to be inflexible, and I am in favour of their being more widely defined where appropriate. However, Parliament should approve the range of conditions, which is the reason for the amendment.