Offender Management Bill

moved Amendment No. 13: 13: Clause 1, page 2, line 24, leave out ““or persons to whom conditional cautions are given”” The noble Baroness said: With this amendment, we challenge the Government’s intentions regarding the future use of conditional cautions. The expansion of their use as a punishment could have significant impact on the work of the probation services, which are core to the Bill. The last paragraph of Clause 1 gives the Secretary of State the power to make regulations that can extend the purposes listed in subsection (1), which we debated last week. He may extend those purposes to include other purposes relating to persons charged with, or convicted of, offences or persons to whom conditional cautions are given. My amendment would prevent the Secretary of State adding extra purposes relating to those who are given conditional cautions. What extra purposes can the Government have in mind? The Minister will recall that, during the passage of the Police and Justice Bill, we expressed our concerns about the Government’s plans to extend widely the use of conditional cautions and in particular to change the purposes for which they can be imposed. I made it clear that we continued to support the provisions launched by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which introduced conditional cautions intended to facilitate the rehabilitation of the offender or to ensure that the offender makes reparation—note that it provides for rehabilitation and reparation. But in the Police and Justice Act the Government took the power for conditional cautions to be imposed as a punishment. My colleague Nick Herbert expressed our concerns in another place about the extension of the purpose of cautions to include punishment, but at that time, after much consideration, we agreed that the clause should remain in the Bill while we assessed the impact of the new proposals, when implemented, on cautioning. I also put on the record our concern about the developments in government policy since the clause was debated in another place. Mr Blair had announced the intention dramatically to increase the use of administrative punishment and to avoid the use of the courts. There was no proper public debate on that matter. In March this year the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General sent me a copy of the consultation on the revised code of practice for conditional cautioning, and I am grateful to him for doing so. When are we likely to see the results of that consultation? Page four of the consultation paper refers to the rolling out of the pre Police and Justice Act cautioning—conditions for rehabilitation or reparation. The Attorney-General’s letter stated that a national roll-out was under way and that the Government were on target to have a conditional cautioning scheme operating in one basic command unit in every force area in England and Wales by summer 2007 and that full implementation of the scheme was planned for March 2008. He added that the Government hoped to introduce the new punitive measures on a phased basis from autumn 2007, so all those changes will take place when the Bill comes into effect and they will have an impact on how contestability in the Bill may operate. What assessment has been made of the impact of the roll-out on probation services’ resources and their dispersal between the different tasks that the services need to fulfil? What extra funds have been needed so far to cover the supervision of those on conditional cautions? What new funds have the Government set aside to cover all the extra work that will follow for probation services when the conditional caution is used widely as a punishment? One assumes that the costs are likely to be heavier since there will be more resistance to fulfilling any directions that are overtly a punishment as opposed to those intended as part of a system of rehabilitation. How do the Government intend to use the powers in subsection (5) to extend the purposes relating to conditional cautions? What impact will that have on the probation services and the cost of running the associated services? I beg to move.