Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, anyone who has spent time in an accident and emergency department on a weekend evening will recognise the truth of what the noble Baroness has just said—that we face an epidemic of alcohol-related crime that is clogging up the A&E departments every weekend, with people being brought in with serious injuries sustained as a result of alcohol-related violence. I declare a personal interest, having been taken into St Thomas’s after suffering a burst colon as a result of being knocked off my bicycle in Millbank. It was on a Saturday night after a delayed reaction to the accident. I was taken in at 4.30 am and had to wait six hours before I received attention, and the whole of St Thomas’s A&E department was filled with people who had suffered alcohol-related injuries on the streets. I echo the noble Baroness in saying that we have signally failed in attempting to find an effective way of dealing particularly with persistent offenders who commit their crimes under the influence of alcohol. London Councils has drawn our attention, as the noble Baroness said, to the fact that almost half all violent crime is fuelled by alcohol, and that each year more than a million alcohol-related hospital admissions occur—and that figure is increasing by 8 per cent per annum. The Home Office estimates that the cost of alcohol-related crime is somewhere around £10.5 billion a year, which does not even count the costs imposed on other departments such as health or justice. These amendments therefore provide a new approach that has been tested and found to be highly effective in reducing serial alcohol-related offences of all kinds, including street violence, driving under the influence, domestic violence, burglary and theft. In South Dakota, where the scheme was pioneered, alcohol-related motor vehicle fatalities were reduced by 60 per cent after the scheme had been in operation for five years. The system has now been extended to neighbouring states and will, I believe, be imminently tested in Strathclyde. I was very impressed by the presentation given to some of your Lordships in a Committee Room upstairs by Professor Humphreys on the behavioural science associated with the Dakota system and why it works. The statistics certainly show that it is highly effective. The essence of the system is that the offender must sign up to total abstinence from alcohol and undergo regular testing to ensure that he adheres to the undertaking. If the test is positive that leads to a further confirmation test, and if that too is positive the breach leads to an immediate court appearance, which could mean a night spent in custody—it mandatorily leads to a night in custody in the case of South Dakota; whereas in the case of the London experiment, which is supported by all the London councils and the GLA, it means an extension of the alcohol monitoring requirement. In the South Dakota pilot, I understand that immediate 24-hour imprisonment was mandatory but, in the review of the proposal, the sentencing power of the courts in the proposed Greater London scheme is far more flexible. The case is overwhelming that we should try this experiment, and I very much hope that the Minister will accept the noble Baroness’s amendment.