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Coroners and Justice Bill

I agree with the amendment put forward by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick. I am concerned that one of these days the sentencing council might be under some pressure, particularly from press reporting. It might have to respond to that in a way that is similar to the problem that Chief Justice Rehnquist pointed out in that important passage read by the noble and learned Lord. Amendment 191 is mixed with this. We spent some time before the Dinner Break on consistency and its importance. Here is an area of obvious inconsistency: the non-judicial disposal of cases, ones that used to go to the magistrates’ court and are now being dealt with by the police and prosecutors and never get to court. It is estimated that anything up to 55 per cent of all cases are not ever getting to court. There is a real danger of lack of consistency between police forces or prosecutors in different parts of the country. Amendment 191, in my name and the names of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, proposes that the council should be able to monitor what is going on on the ground in creating out-of-court disposals, fixed penalty notices, penalty notices for disorder and conditional cautions. At the end of the day, somebody who accepts one of these has a criminal mark against them for the rest of their lives, particularly for certain circumstances such as dealing with children. I suspect a conditional caution would be enough to come within the vulnerable persons legislation for being on the register. It is important that there should be some review of the way in which the police and prosecutors—the CPS—deal with people who never actually get to court. There should be some recognition that this is going on to such a large degree and there should be some monitoring. The only organisation that could properly monitor it would be the sentencing council. I appreciate that this might give it a fairly large extra duty, but it is highly desirable that the police and prosecutors should know that the way in which they are working in one part of the country may be wholly different from the way in which they are working in another part. As the Government are so rightly concerned with consistency in court, they ought also to be concerned with non-judicial disposal out of court.