Written evidence to be reported to the House

Part of Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 4:30 pm on 16 October 2007.

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Cindy Barnett: It came out of certain evaluations. I am not sure whether they were final evaluations, but they were certainly preliminary looks at adult conditional cautioning schemes. In some cases, putting the conditions in place took more time than if somebody came to court. Conditional cautioning is a more complicated process than a fixed penalty of whatever sort. In itself, it has more time built in.

Going back to the previous point, we would also say that there is an element of confusion and a lack of boundary, particularly for young people in these provisions, because you can go through so many forms of pre-court intervention before you end up in front of a court. That can have two negative effects. First, wild confusion for the young person, who may not take seriously what they ought to take seriously. Secondly, it ratchets up so much by the time the case gets to court a person may not be in a very good position. That is entirely wrong. There are already a great number of pre-court interventions that are not formal. Youth offending teams and police get involved with young people. There are many things, such as acceptable behaviour contracts, that are not criminal sanctions, but voluntary contracts. There is an enormous amount of good work, which we support as much and for as long as possible.

When you get to a conditional caution, you are dealing with behaviour that is deemed serious enough to be dealt with—with strings attached, with lots of things you have to do—and still you are not coming to court. We would say that that is wrong.