Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-08
Topic: Law and Crime
Brian Paddick (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): In that case, I point out how completely inadequate the Minister’s answers have been. He completely did not address the research, which shows that there is no evidence that cautions with conditions attached are any more effective than simple cautions—there is no evidence. The noble Lord himself admitted that there cannot be any evidence because the Home Office does not keep any figures. It does not differentiate between conditional cautions and simple cautions; it just aggregates all cautions together. It also keeps no record of what conditions are applied in cases of conditional caution, so the Government have no evidence upon which to base this system, in which all cautions have to have conditions attached. They cannot demonstrate the efficacy of that system, and the research in the pilot forces also shows no impact on reoffending rates, little or no impact on victim satisfaction and significant increases in cost. The Minister has provided no reassurance on those issues at all As far as the amendments are concerned, conditional cautions are supposed to be about rehabilitation and reparation. How can an untrained police officer be an expert on what sort of rehabilitation a particular offender should undertake to have maximum impact on their reoffending? As both the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, said, the problem is not only the inconsistency of whether the conditions that different forces attach will have any efficacy at all—the Minister admitted that there would be inconsistency between forces—but a lack of public confidence in the system the Government are proposing. In one force area, someone will have very stringent rehabilitation and reparation conditions attached; for almost exactly the same type of individual and the same sort of offence, a completely different system or set of conditions will be applied. How can that provide the public with any confidence that justice is being done, when completely different conditions are being attached to very similar offenders and offences in different parts of the country, unless the officers who are giving out these conditions have been specifically trained, told what the standard approach is and approved by the Crown Prosecution Service, as my amendments suggest The noble Lord said that the safeguards and checks and balances will be included in codes of practice. I will tell the Committee why such an approach is not acceptable. With the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, it turns out that, despite the arguments that we made against the safeguards and checks and balances being relegated to codes of practice, the Government now accept that any police inspector, whether specifically trained in dealing with covert human intelligence sources or not, can authorise a CHIS to commit a crime. That person will be immune from prosecution, even though that inspector is not authorised by their force or trained to give that authority —it is in the codes of practice. But the Government have admitted, in a letter to me from the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, that, if an untrained, unauthorised inspector authorised a CHIS to commit a crime, it would not be unlawful. That person would therefore be immune from prosecution. That is the danger of relegating safeguards, checks and balances to codes of practice and not having them in legislation The only thing I can take from what the Minister said is that this is really about saving court time and CPS time; I think I quote him accurately. It is not about preventing reoffending because we know that this system does not reduce it. It is about trying to take pressure off the courts, and that is no way to administer justice. We should give the criminal justice system the resources that it needs rather than taking the shoddy short cut to justice proposed in this part of the Bill. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.