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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach. I am speaking about the breach, and I will come to my conclusion if I may. I am not talking about inconsiderable numbers. There is nothing meaningful that can be done in prison to prevent a person from breaching a community order, so what such people are doing merely exacerbates the main problem facing our prisons at considerable expense and to no good effect. I am very conscious of the problems facing the magistrates. Those problems were very ably set out by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. I refer particularly to the effects of this on the Prison Service ever since the 2003 Act and the increased numbers of people in prison merely for breaching a community order. I personally welcome the flexibility that Clause 63 allows, in that a court dealing with breaches now has new options of taking no action or fining. However, the clause does not provide enough protection for the Prison Service, which is why I am tabling the two amendments, deleting the sub-paragraph and inviting the Minister to consider that the powers to resentence someone to custody for breach should be awarded only if the original sentence was an imprisonable one. I beg to move.