Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for his support on this, the first group of amendments that I am dealing with on this Bill. That is extremely welcome. Maybe the issue to which he refers rather reflects upon the quantity of legislation that this House has dealt with over a number of years. I absolutely take his point about the need for clarity and for linking Bills one to another. I will seek to clarify what we understand these two amendments would do and why we resist them. They would repeal some of the provisions giving powers to both magistrates’ courts and the Crown Court to deal with breach of a community order. The provisions that the amendments propose to repeal give the courts the power to imprison offenders for serious breach of community orders which have been imposed for offences which do not carry imprisonment. Noble Lords agree on that. As it so happens, community orders cannot currently be imposed for offences which do not carry imprisonment, so these provisions may appear to be redundant and I can appreciate why the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, might have tabled these amendments. However, they were certainly needed in the past and it was only in 2008 that the community order stopped being available for non-imprisonable offences. Before then, a community sentence could be imposed for a non-imprisonable offence. When that happened, these provisions were the only way that a breach could be dealt with—by sending the offender to prison—so however serious the breach, there would have been no custodial disposal without these measures. As I have noted, since 2008 there has on the face of it been no further need for them to remain on the statute book because they are, in practice, no longer necessary. However, it is not quite as straightforward as that, complex though that may seem. There is an unimplemented provision in Section 151 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which, if it were commenced, would allow the courts to impose a community order on a persistent offender, in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, has spelt out, who has at least three previous fines, even if the offence they committed was not serious enough to cross the community sentence threshold. If that provision in Section 151 were to be implemented, it would become possible once more for a community order to be imposed for an offence which did not carry imprisonment. It follows that we would therefore need the provisions which the noble Lord’s amendments would repeal to ensure that a persistent offender who gets a community order because they have received at least three fines could be penalised by imprisonment in case of breach. Effectively, these two measures go together. While we retain the sentencing power, even if it is not in force, we also need the breach power. I should perhaps say that we have no intention at present to implement the sentencing power but, as I have explained, while this is still an option, we need the breach power against the possibility that it might happen in the future.