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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 27: 27: Clause 5, page 4, line 14, at end insert ““written”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment was dealt with on 6 February in Committee at col. 1092. It concerns the obligation to have an audit trail for community orders. The government position in Committee was that it is not necessary to specify in the Bill what is basic case management and that the level of detail demanded by our amendment was inappropriate. Of course, I know that it is normal practice for instructions to be given in writing. Given the importance of the consequences of breach in this new regime, surely it must be in the interests of the authorities to have a complete record in relation to every individual of the various stages that they have gone through in the process. I think the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, suggested that in about 90 per cent of cases the national standards elicited an appropriate written record. I did not think that percentage was satisfactory and it added weight to my desire to have in the Bill an obligation that the history of any individual case should be, as a matter of law, in writing. That is why I have brought this amendment back again. Perhaps I can put the point another way. A person against whom an allegation of breach is made in court would be perfectly within his rights to say that there was no record of it and no written instruction was sent to him. The Government are acting against their own interests by resisting what I am proposing. I beg to move.