Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

No. I have dealt with that point enough. I want to focus on two other serious omissions from this Bill, the first of which I have already referred to. During the statement of 11 July on the Government's legislative programme, the Prime Minister said:"““We stand ready to introduce new measures into the Criminal Justice Bill, which will be carried over into the next Session, including measures that come from the review of policing by Sir Ronald Flanagan, which will report later this autumn.””—[Official Report, 11 July 2007; Vol. 462, c. 1451.]" The Lord Chancellor's response was not adequate in this respect. When the Minister of State responds, perhaps he can tell us which proposals in Sir Ronnie Flanagan's review of policing, which was intended to reduce police bureaucracy, will be carried into the Bill by way of amendments. We would have proposed abolition of the stop form—it takes police officers several minutes to complete, and we regard it as a significant impediment to their ability to interact with the public—and the wholesale reduction of central targets. I doubt very much whether we will see those measures, but the fact is that the Lord Chancellor would not confirm the introduction of any measures on policing, despite the promise that the Prime Minister made as recently as July. The other absence from the Bill is any consideration of the impact of the Government's summary justice programme, under which whole swathes of cases have been taken out of the magistrates courts altogether and are now being dealt with by police officers by way of cautions and fixed penalty notices. They are counted as offences brought to justice, even when those notices are not paid. That policy is consistent with an underlying feature of this Bill that has characterised many other criminal justice Bills that this Government have brought before the House: a cavalier approach to the civil liberties that this House should be protecting. We have seen proposals for ending the discretion of the Court of Appeal to quash convictions, and the criticism of them by the legal profession, not least the Law Society. In the light of that, the Lord Chancellor has conceded that he will reconsider the drafting of that provision. There are also violent offender orders—the latest in a line of quasi-criminal measures that started with antisocial behaviour orders, and which continued with control orders and serious crime prevention orders. Those orders deliberately blur the line between the criminal and civil law. Their effectiveness—especially in the case of ASBOs, half of which are breached—must raise great concern about whether violent offender orders will be similarly robust. Such orders effectively use the civil law to criminalise people while sidestepping the job of any Government, which is to ensure that they have a legal framework to deal properly with offenders. There is also the arbitrary cap on compensation for miscarriages of justice, which is set out in clause 62. Finally in relation to civil liberties, there is a proposal for the extension of conditional cautions to juvenile offenders—conditional cautions under which prosecutors will be able to impose a punishment with no involvement by the judiciary, which is a fundamental breach of the judiciary's role in sentencing people. The fundamental problem at the heart of this Christmas tree Bill is that it contains a rag-bag of ineffective measures, including some that are cavalier with the civil liberties that we are here to protect.