Clause 10 - Breach of drinking banning orders
Violent Crime Reduction Bill
5:30 pm
Hazel Blears (Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety), Home Office; Salford, Labour)
Breach of an ASBO can carry a custodial penalty of up to five years, because it is clearly a serious matter, but custody is not mandatory for breach of an ASBO, and in many cases, particularly where young people are concerned, community penalties have been used, with a range of other sentences. Earlier in our debate the hon. Gentleman welcomed the flexibility that the Government introduced in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, enabling a range of different community penalties to be used by judges and magistrates to target offences. Now he is trying to face both ways. He says that he welcomes a range of community penalties because he thinks that they are much more useful for targeting behaviour and getting people to change their behaviour than the old sentences of custody or a fine; yet now he says that a range of penalties for breach of a drinking banning order is not appropriate.
Breach of an ASBO will often happen after a lengthy period in which people are subjected to violence, intimidation and harassment, which is intolerable behaviour to many of our constituents. Breach of a drinking banning order may amount to someone going into a pub from which they are excluded and carrying on visiting it as they used to. That is of a significantly different character from some breaches of the serious prohibitions in ASBOs. We are aiming for proportionate penalties for breach of a drinking banning order. If the hon. Gentleman means to say that courts should always respond to such incidents in the same way, he means to deny them that flexibility.
Custody should be reserved for serious, dangerous and persistent offenders, but it will still be available for persistent breaches of the community sentence imposed for the original breach of the drinking banning order. We do not propose to change the requirement that courts should consider making a drinking banning order following a conviction in every case. That is another point of difference from ASBOs, which are made on application or where a serious chain of events has occurred, in a persistent chronic set of circumstances. Drinking banning orders might not always be made in those circumstances. They might be made to give people a short, sharp shock. They might last for two months only. We do not think that breach of a two-month drinking banning order should necessarily result in a custodial sentence.