Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, this is a very important social issue. I do not think that anyone in the House disputes the fact that alcohol-related crime is a scourge blighting too many of our city and town centres and one we must address. I pay tribute to many noble Lords, especially the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Jenkin, and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for ensuring that we have reached this point. Through their amendments in Committee for an alcohol-monitoring requirement, this issue was flagged up in the way that it was last year in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill.

In that regard, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, who brought her knowledge, experience and wisdom to this area, including when dealing with the previous incarnation of this issue during the debates on the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, has given an insight into the terrible harm that alcohol-fuelled violence can cause to victims and their families. I applaud the work that she has undertaken to help the Government establish a more effective approach to building active and safer communities, and in particular the work that she is leading to develop community-led, partnership-based approaches to tackling alcohol-fuelled crime and anti-social behaviour.

As noble Lords have demonstrated through their persuasive and informed words, it is vital that we look at new innovative ways of tackling the causes of alcohol-fuelled crime. That is why the Government have committed, as I set out in Committee, to undertake pilots to trial sobriety requirements as part of conditional cautions and community orders. Since then, we have considered the noble Baroness’s amendments. I was also fortunate to listen to the presentation from the United States based around experience in both South Dakota and Hawaii.

We have attempted to capture the essential elements of the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in order to provide a practical power for the court to impose sober behaviour on offenders who commit alcohol-related crime. Through these means we will send a clear message that if you abuse your right to drink and damage those around you, that right can be taken away from you. That is why the Government are bringing forward their own amendment which provides courts with a new power to impose an alcohol abstinence and monitoring requirement as part of a community order or suspended sentence order on an offender who has committed an alcohol-related offence.

The amendment forms an important part of our wider response to these problems, introducing a new and innovative way of tackling the causes of alcohol-fuelled crime through enforced sobriety schemes. I pay tribute at this stage to the work of the London mayor, Boris Johnson, and the deputy mayor, Kit Malthouse, and to their commitment in this area. Their work on the alcohol abstinence and monitoring requirements is a testament to their determination to make a stand against alcohol-fuelled crime in the capital and we will continue to work with them in the development of this initiative.

The requirement as part of community orders and suspended sentence orders will therefore focus on serious offences, in particular violent offences, where alcohol is often a contributing factor, such as common assault, actual bodily harm, affray and violent disorder. Under the Government’s proposed alcohol abstinence and monitoring requirements, offenders will be required by the court to abstain from drinking for a period specified by the court up to 120 days. They will be required either to attend a police station or test centre to be monitored by breathalyser equipment or to wear an alcohol tag around their ankle. This innovative new electronic monitoring technology will test sobriety at half-hourly intervals during the day.

Before imposing a requirement, the court will have to establish a link between alcohol consumption and the offending behaviour. In a case where the offender does not comply with the conditions of the requirement, existing breach proceedings will ensue and the courts will have robust powers to penalise the non-compliance.

I wish to make clear that this requirement does not amount to treatment. That is not to say that supporting programmes such as alcohol awareness and education courses do not have a use here, alongside the abstinence requirement, to help ensure that offenders seek to change their alcohol-fuelled offending behaviour. However, it is distinct from the alcohol treatment requirement and the alcohol specified activity requirement, which seek to treat dependent drinkers and provide advice and support to offenders with other alcohol-related needs. For alcohol-dependent offenders and others needing treatment these options will continue to be the best avenue for addressing these issues.

These new provisions enable the Government to carry out initial trials which will test the processes and practicalities of enforced sobriety schemes and help build the confidence of the probation officials and sentencers who will operate them. We will make use of the lessons learnt to inform further work in this area. We are carrying out an additional pilot to test sobriety schemes as part of conditional cautions. The conditional caution is an out-of-court disposal which aims to tackle low-level crime. The pilot scheme will therefore be targeted at offences such as drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and public disorder, which account for a considerable volume of alcohol-related offences overall. The condition requires an offender to abstain from drinking on the days they are most likely to offend as a result of alcohol and to attend a police station to be tested, using a breathalyser, on those days—for example, Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

We have already had interest from a number of police areas in piloting the conditional caution scheme, particularly from cities where alcohol-fuelled crime is a severe problem. We heard quite a lot about that in Committee. We will announce the pilot areas in the forthcoming government alcohol strategy. The first conditional cautions enforcing sobriety should be administered from April/May. We believe that this is a considered and effective amendment to test out the important concept of reducing alcohol-fuelled crime.

Amendments 152ZC and 152ZD seek to remove provisions under Section 223 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to amend the minimum period of time specified for a drug rehabilitation requirement or alcohol treatment requirement under Sections 209 and 212 of the same Act. The Government are taking forward provisions in the Bill to remove the statutory minimum period for drug rehabilitation requirements and alcohol treatment requirements in order to increase the use and effectiveness of these requirements, allowing for greater flexibility in tailoring and delivering treatment and recovery options to individual needs. Provisions under Section 223 for these requirements are therefore no longer necessary.

The alcohol abstinence and monitoring requirement, introduced by our amendments, is to be available to the courts in England and Wales but not, of course, to the courts of Scotland or Northern Ireland. It is our intention that the requirement should not be capable of being imposed by a court in England and Wales on a person who is resident in Scotland or Northern Ireland. We undertake to bring forward and table amendments at Third Reading to make that clear. I beg to move.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I have some amendments in this group, but of course I am absolutely delighted that the Government have decided to bring forward their own amendments. If the House approves those amendments, I will withdraw the amendments in my name. I would like to add my thanks to all Peers from all sides of the House who have worked tirelessly to try to ensure that this localism response for local communities to deal with alcohol-fuelled offences can actually proceed and that this new sentencing ability will be available to the courts. I would also like to single out the noble Baronesses, Lady Browning and Lady Northover, both of whom have gone to great lengths to listen to all sides of the argument and to take those representations away. I know that they really have worked very hard behind the scenes to get to the point that we have reached today.

The government amendments do not include the “offender pay” content set out in my amendments. I understand that this is a complex issue and, depending on the outcome of the pilots, could be revisited at a later stage, but it has wider implications. The advantage of now being able to proceed with breathalyser pilots as well as tags is that, for those who have to present daily or twice daily for breathalysing, they will encounter staff who will be able to see how they are coping and offer them support to cope with all the other aspects of their lives that they have not been managing well and that have been contributing to their alcohol abuse. There is that support element and I know from the United States that the failure rate with tags is about nine times that with breathalysers. That is partly because the offenders tend to think that the electronics will fail and do not believe in the efficacy of the tags. They sometimes try to tamper with them and so on. It will be very important to see how it works here and compare the different systems.

This week there was a motion to seek international endorsement for these types of programmes from the 180-signatory nations to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. These kinds of schemes are being debated there as well. I have had meetings with police officers from different parts of the UK and a consistent story that comes through is that after 10 pm at night alcohol-related problems are between 80 and 100 per cent of their workload, depending in part on the night of the week. Evidence of decreased reoffending has come from the USA and in the pilots we will be able to see whether that is replicated here. There, they are reporting a more than 50 per cent drop in reoffending at three years; a more than 50 per cent drop in drink-driving offences; and a more than 10 per cent drop in domestic violence. There has also been a fall in incarceration rates. Alcohol use appears to be interrupted before the person who has been abusing the alcohol can actually kill somebody, so they have decreased the very serious end of crime as well. We know that in London the Metropolitan Police recorded 18,500 offences flagged for alcohol. Offences involving violence against the person accounted for 64 per cent of those.