Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

In anticipating what the Minister might say in response to Amendment No. 6, I thought that I would get my retaliation in first. I want to say briefly why I think the Bill’s current option will not help in reversing the increase in child custody that my noble friend Lady Linklater so eloquently pointed out. We know that without a clear restriction on custody, courts will wholly or largely substitute that for other community sentences. There is good evidence for that. The ISS programme, which was rolled out nationally in October 2003, was made available to courts on a significant scale with 5,568 placements in 2005-06, and 1,350 places in use at any one time. It has been heavily promoted as an intensive and robust programme, and the evaluation evidence is that it successfully addresses a wide range of needs among serious and persistent young offenders. Yet, as my noble friend, pointed out, in a period when youth crime has been stable, the number in custody has risen. As currently drafted the Bill is unlikely to change that. The Government argue that under Clause 1(4), ISS would be available only for offences that are "““(a) … punishable with imprisonment””," and when, "““(b) the court is of the opinion that the offence … was so serious that””," custody would otherwise be appropriate. However, the test in subsection (4)(a) simply identifies the maximum sentence a category of offence can attract, saying nothing about what the particular offence or person warrants. Subsection (4)(b) is highly subjective, which turns on the court’s opinion. Neither of those provisions directly tackles the uses of custody, which is what we are seeking to address with the proposed new clause.