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Police and Justice Bill

We have listened carefully, during the course of debates, to the concerns raised in this House and in the other place about the proposed extension of the conditional cautioning to include punitive conditions. Those concerns centred on the discretion that would be available to prosecutors, particularly with respect to financial penalties. We therefore tabled amendments in the other place to deal with that. The amendments achieve four objectives. First, they reduce the maximum amount of any required financial penalty from £500 to £250. Secondly, they provide that the financial penalties can be used only in respect of a set of offences specified in secondary legislation. Thirdly, they require that secondary legislation must specify in relation to each offence the maximum penalty for that offence or group of offences. The prosecutor would have some discretion to set a lower financial penalty than would otherwise be attracted by the offence in question—for example, to take account of the offender’s ability to pay. There will therefore be a maximum for that particular offence according to the prosecutor’s judgment about offender’s being able to pay. Finally, the amendments make subject to the affirmative resolution procedure any proposed changes to the maximum hours—set at 20 in the Bill—that an offender can be required to attend at a specified place and to the maximum financial penalty of £250.