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Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 91E: Page 8, line 37, leave out ““one”” and insert ““two”” The noble Baroness said: The amendment stands in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Dholakia. We are addressing a critical shift in the role and function of conditional cautions in the Bill. Hitherto, cautions have been primarily positive in nature, with rehabilitation and reparation being their chief purpose. They were part of the armoury of prevention and a way of keeping people out of the criminal justice system, which is a truly important goal. Clause 15, however, introduces a third element, that of ““punishing the offender””. The purpose of the amendment affirms that punishment on its own is unlikely to be productive; reparation or rehabilitation is needed in conjunction with punishment for a positive outcome. This, after all, is the sort of thing we all teach our children from a very early age. It is absolutely fundamental. The amendment would achieve the goal of always combining the positive with punishment and it would statutorily endorse the Government’s stated support for this approach. While this is an apparently simple and small change, the implications go wide and deep in terms of how vulnerable children in particular are dealt with, how their relations with the police and offending in general are managed constructively, and, most importantly, how we keep such young people out of the criminal justice system. I beg to move.