---

Police and Justice Bill

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The cases that I was citing are cases in which, I fear, the person concerned has gone on to commit a multiplicity of offences, but there is no evidence that he has been committing offences for some time. In some cases the alleged offender is very old. Difficult issues are involved. I have anxieties about the principle of cautions being used in serious offences. It cuts both ways. If the offence is very serious, people may end up accepting cautions when they ought to be pleading not guilty to the offence. That is a form of plea bargaining, and we know—we will come to it in the next group of amendments—that there may be a massive disparity between the sentence that a person may attract if they are convicted in court, and the relatively lenient sentence that may be visited on them if they accept their guilt previously.