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Antisocial Behaviour

I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I shall deal with exactly that point in a moment. A report from the centre for crime and justice studies at King’s college showed that, from March 2004 to March 2006, the proportion of offences brought to justice that resulted in a successful conviction fell from just under 70 per cent. to 53 per cent. By that measure, the true justice gap—the failure to bring offences to justice—may have increased over the past two years because, if penalty notices for disorder involve no admission of guilt, can they really be considered to be true justice? The Government have taken hundreds of thousands of quite serious cases out of the courts and punished criminals with little more than a slap on the wrist. The Government’s latest idea, outlined in the November consultation paper, is a deferred penalty notice for disorder. The proposal would mean that a fine would not be payable for up to six months, or might even not be paid at all. In effect, the notice would be a warning that the offender would receive a warning. I wonder whether the Government plan to count those deferred penalty notices for disorder as offences brought to justice. That would certainly help their detection rates. Summary justice increasingly means soft justice. In the words of a chief Crown prosecutor, it amounts to"““pay-as-you-go hooliganism.””" Summary justice can also lead to injustice. The Minister knows, because I have raised this matter with him before, that a stallholder at the royal Norfolk show in July 2006 was fined £80 and given a penalty notice for disorder by the police. His offence was that he displayed a T-shirt that the report in The Times said bore the slogan ““Bollocks to Blair””.