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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, it gives me very great pleasure to say how impressed I am by the care, assiduity and sensitivity with which the Government and the Opposition have approached this question. One of the most important conclusions that a court can ever arrive at is to deprive a young person of his or her liberty. However, I am not sure that I entirely agree with the argument put forward so clearly and fairly by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. There are two stages to the judge’s consideration. First, and this follows rather slavishly the wording, if I remember rightly, of Section 152 of the 2003 Act, it must be considered whether the threshold for custody has been crossed—in other words, whether the seriousness of that offence, with one other offence, at least, taken into consideration, is such that anything other than the custodial disposal would not be justified. That is not the exact wording but would be near to it. Therefore, there is a preliminary decision as to whether that threshold has been crossed. The learned judge then says, ““If that has been crossed, I will have to consider all the other considerations, including, of course, the offender’s antecedence and, no doubt, all the information that can be given in either a written or an oral report””. What is concerned here is not so much a final decision by the learned judge, but a preliminary one as to the crossing of that threshold line. My other point is that although a written report is always to be preferred to an oral one, I would like to pay the highest possible tribute to those hardworking probation officers in daily attendance at the courts who, sometimes at very short notice, will produce a most incisive and comprehensive report on an offender’s situation. They can be helped, of course, by the learned judge having had the papers the night before and digested them and, having warned learned counsel before 10.30 am, informing that person that he would like that report done. Sometimes—and I am afraid that I was guilty of this from time to time—it might be at 12.45 pm that one would ask for that report by 2 pm. However, my own experience was that these reports were prepared with very great conscientiousness, dedication and thoroughness. Almost invariably, a person asked to conduct such an inquiry would first get in touch with the probation officer who had written the last report and, if that was not possible, to have the matter adjourned for a few hours until that report was available. Therefore, one should not demote the verbal report too much, because in most cases, it will be of a very high standard. It will enable the judge, once there has been a preliminary decision under Section 152, as a crossing of the threshold, to be able to review that situation in the light of all the information that the court will then have.