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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I also want to echo the warm congratulations which have been expressed to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, on achieving some nine-tenths of what she set out to do in her original amendment. She is quite right to suggest to your Lordships that we should accept the Government's solution, which omits the ““offender pays”” part of her original scheme. However, ultimately we will need to consider whether offenders should be made to pay some of the costs that they impose on the community—not specifically in the context of alcohol-related offences, but perhaps over a broader area. I see no reason why ““offender pays”” schemes should not be considered in a more general way, if not in the context of these particular amendments. It is excellent news that London is to be one of the pilot areas, considering the huge burden that alcohol-related crime imposes on the capital's health and criminal justice systems. According to the London health improvement board, the capital suffers a higher rate of alcohol-related violence—particularly sexual violence—than the rest of England, and the total annual cost of the health and social impacts of alcohol misuse to the capital is a staggering £2.46 billion. The more robust the measures for tackling this appalling waste of financial and human resources, the better it will be. Perhaps I may ask my noble friend about the other towns and cities where she told us the trials relating to conditional cautions are to be been conducted. If these are to be started in April or May, then surely some of these cities must have been identified already. It would be useful if she could give us further details on that matter before the end of this debate. Perhaps I may also ask my noble friend why the Government do not provide money for additional major cities, apart from those which have already been chosen, where alcohol-related crime is a big problem, so that they can join in the pilots at their own discretion. That would be a really valuable example of localism that would almost certainly achieve a substantial net return on the investment. Strathclyde, in Scotland, has its own AMR pilot in the near future, depending on the availability of funding from the Scottish Government. I wonder whether the Welsh Assembly would have the power to pilot a similar scheme in Cardiff. In England, however, a city that had a mind to conduct a pilot would have to provide the upfront costs, while the downstream benefits would be largely, though not entirely, at the national level. I would grateful if, when my noble friend comes to wind up, she could say a word or two about how the funding would be organised if, as we believe, these pilots demonstrate a substantial return on the investment for the country as a whole.