Offender Management Bill

I support the amendment. As we all know, and as has been mentioned, conditional cautions were introduced in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and are a form of administrative justice. They offer an alternative to entering the criminal justice system for low-level offending and are greatly to be welcomed as a break on what can be seen as a recent creeping tendency for sentencing to widen the net and for offenders to become criminalised at an earlier stage. As we have also heard, when conditional cautions were introduced, their objective was absolutely clear. They were an essentially non-punitive response to low-level offending which gave police the opportunity to press home the unacceptability of the behaviour and to attach conditions which were exclusively focused on reparation and rehabilitation. This approach is greatly to be encouraged as widely as possible, not least because those two objectives also have the best chances of giving satisfaction to the victim and reducing reoffending. We strongly support them. We had some lengthy arguments during the passage of the Police and Justice Bill when the Government wanted to extend the conditions to include other sanctions, such as fines, which went beyond the original intentions and were essentially punitive. As I understood it, it was then agreed that there would be trials in a few areas to test out the wider approach. On the basis that this would be revisited before being more widely applied, we accepted that situation at the time. The Bill already allows for probation services to be involved in determining whether conditional cautions should be given—and, if so, which cautions should be attached—and for the supervision of anybody to whom such a caution is given. In that sense, it seems entirely superfluous to include this sentence in the Bill, and raises the worry that it is another way of paving the way to the further extensions that we resisted during the passage of the Police andJustice Bill. The extension of administrative justice, even to speed up the process of justice—which I know was an issue for the Government at the time—or in a limited form, is absolutely undesirable. It would be welcome if the Minister could categorically reassure the Committee that no such measures will be taken, or included in the Bill, until all the issues have been revisited, as we were last year assured they would be.