Schedule 1
Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill
9:00 am
David Heath (Shadow Secretary of State for Justice & Lord Chancellor, Ministry of Justice; Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
Good morning, Sir Nicholas. It is rare that any Member of the House gets both parts of my constituency’s name right. I regret that despite your correct strictures—your strictures are always absolutely correct—the Government are still in the dark. It is a great shame, but no doubt the lights will eventually be repaired.
This is a substantial group of amendments. Although they all cover the same broad area—breach of youth rehabilitation orders—they can be grouped into four subsidiary topics. I shall deal first with amendments Nos. 121 to 127, which deal with the venue for hearing breaches of rehabilitation orders. Such orders will be made in the magistrates court, but on breach the case is to be returned to the Crown court. Now, if the young person is aged under 18 the case will be returned to a youth court; and for an adult over the age of 18 it will be returned to the magistrates court. However, there is a lack of discretion in the Bill’s provisions, which requires that a breach be returned automatically to the Crown court. For a number of reasons, there are question marks against that procedure.
A breach may take many forms. It may be a deliberate breach, with the young person simply not being prepared to accept the terms of the order; but it might be what I would consider an inadvertent or an incompetent breach, at a much lower level of culpability. The advice that I have received—again, I pay tribute to the Standing Committee for Youth Justice for its help—is that a young person on a standard six-month supervision order might have kept 90 per cent. of his or her appointments but still be in breach because of a third unacceptable failure to attend an appointment. There may have been no intent not to comply with the order, but a third failure to make an appointment during that period would result in the young person coming before a Crown court.
There are a number of problems with that. First, in administrative and resource terms, it does not entirely make sense for what one might consider to be relatively trivial breaches to be heard by a Crown court, with all the expense that that entails. Crown courts are significantly more expensive venues for hearing such cases than the youth court would be. Secondly, a Crown court is essentially an adult court, and it could be argued that a young person in such circumstances should not be put before a Crown court unless there was a clear need to do so.