| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
25 July 2007 : Column 1160W—continued
Courts: Nottingham
Mr. Allen: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice pursuant to the answer of 15 May 2007, Official Report, column 707W, on courts: Nottingham, whether the assessment of the impact of powers under section 178 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 has been completed. [152674]
Maria Eagle: The assessment of impact of the proposed extension of review powers under section 178 to 11 new community justice areas (including Nottingham) was completed, and an affirmative order providing for the extension was laid before Parliament. The order was debated in Committee, and was duly approved by the House of Commons on 16 July and the House of Lords on 17 July.
Dangerous Driving
Mark Lazarowicz: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice when he plans to implement the section of the Road Safety Act 2006 on causing death by careless driving. [152471]
Maria Eagle: We aim to implement the new offence of causing death by careless driving in the autumn once the Sentencing Guidelines Council (SGC) has published sentencing guidelines for it.
During the passage of the Act through Parliament, concerns were expressed about how the new offences contained in that Act would be used in practice and how they should fit with the overall framework of bad driving offences. We therefore felt it essential to wait for the SGC, who are responsible for publishing definitive sentencing guidelines for all criminal offences for England and Wales, to produce guidelines to ensure consistency in sentencing. Although the guidelines will not apply to Scotland, it seemed sensible to implement the offence at the same time in all the areas concerned.
The SGC have informed us that they hope to issue guidelines on this subject in autumn 2007 following full consultation. They are treating this as a priority.
Drugs: Crime
Mr. Vara: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many people were cautioned for drug-related offences in each of the last 10 years; what average prison sentence was awarded for each different category of drug-related offence in each of those years; and what average prison sentence was served by those convicted of drug-related offences in each of the last 10 years, broken down by category of offence. [151993]
Mr. Hanson: The information requested on cautions and the average immediate custodial sentence length, for the years 1995 to 2005, is contained in the tables.
This is confined to offences under the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 etc. as it is not possible to identify from the Court Proceedings database the number of other offences committed while persons are under the influence of drugs or those committed to finance a drugs habit.
Information on the average time served for all offences, by sentence length can be found in tables 10.1 and 10.2 of the Offender Management Caseload
Statistics 2005, copies of which can be found in the House of Commons Library. This information is also available at the following websites:
For the years before 2003 table 3.14 in Prison statistics England and Wales 2002 (CM 5996) gives average time served in prison under sentence by prisoners discharged from 1993 to 2002. Copies of this publication can be found in the House of Commons Library.
The data, which are obtained from the prison IT system, are not shown separately by offence because the numbers at this level of detail cannot be guaranteed.
These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system, and although shown to the last individual the figures may not be accurate to that level.
| Table 1: Number of offenders cautioned for drug offences England and Wales, 1996-2005( 1,2,3) | |
| Number cautioned | |
| (1) These data are provided on the principal offence basis. (2) Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from large administrative data systems generated by police forces. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when those data are used. (3) Formal warnings for cannabis possession were introduced nationally from April 2004. There were 39,258 formal warnings for cannabis possession in 2004-05 and 62,586 in 2005-06. Source: RDS—Office for Criminal Justice Reform | |
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |