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Baroness Anelay of St Johns rose to move, as an amendment to Commons Amendment No. 8, Amendment No. 8A:
8A Line 7, leave out "must" and insert "may"
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, in moving this amendment, as an amendment to Commons Amendment No. 8, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 8B to 8E and 10A to 10C.
When we were all trying to jump the gun a bit to get to these exciting new government proposals, my noble friend Lord Carlisle of Bucklow made the point for us all. Here we have three ways in which a new surcharge is to be imposed by the Government: three new clauses making substantial changes, and yet, all together in one group, very difficult for all of us to be able adequately to debate.
All my amendments were tabled with the sole aim of trying to signal in advance some of the questions that I might pose. Indeed, the noble Baroness has answered most of them—although, I must say, not quite all; I have one or two left. Overall, I thought that it was important for the Government to bring rather more clarity and transparency to the proposals than they had so far in another place. There was little or none there until the 11th hour, on Report last week.
As the noble Baroness said today, the Government proposals first saw the light of day in their consultation paper published on 12 January this year—after the Bill had started its progress through this House. When that consultation paper was produced, there was overwhelming support in response for better services for victims but very divided opinion on the matter of the surcharge. The majority of objections to the Government's proposals concerned the road traffic surcharges. If we were in Committee or on Report, I would quote extensively from those objections, but I shall certainly not do that at this stage. I merely mention that bodies such as the Police Federation and the Magistrates' Association are against those surcharges for practical reasons.
There was a furore in the press. The Government appeared to back off. On Second Reading, the Home Secretary said that the measure would not apply to the vast swathes of motoring offences. At that stage,
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public opinion settled back down again, as did the red-top newspapers, in the belief that the Government would surcharge only the most serious traffic offenders and criminals who commit theft and violent offences.
The government new clauses in Amendments Nos. 8 and 9 are therefore pretty much what the public expected. They are certainly what we expected. But we should note that the proposal to surcharge those who are committed to prison makes a significant departure from the principle that I understood had always underpinned sentencing practice: that you should not mix a custodial with a financial penalty. Does the Minister agree that it has been usual practice in sentencing that, if there is a fine to be paid, as distinct from compensation, and a person is to be committed to prison, it has been good practice to commute the fine to extra days in prison? That recognises the importance of ensuring that when the offender is released, he or she makes a clean start and therefore should not be tempted to steal to pay the fine.
My amendments concerning the surcharge on people put into custody were indeed there to probe just what flexibility the Government want. As all governments do, perhaps, they want even more flexibility than I was prepared to concede. I was trying to argue, through those amendments, that we should be able to trust the judiciary properly to look at the circumstances of each offender to determine whether it was appropriate to add the surcharge. As on many occasions throughout the Bill, the Government's response was to say, "That is not the way we want to do it. We want to have this flat rate, and we will have the Secretary of State with his own power. If, later on, we think that the approach is not working then we will have the Secretary of State issue an order saying when the penalty shall not be imposed".
At this late stage I shall certainly not contest that position. I shall look very carefully at how the system works on the RDS section of the Home Office website, which is a very good facility for letting us know what the department is getting up to—sometimes it is even quite clear about what it is getting up to, but not always. I shall certainly keep an eye on the matter.
There are greater problems with the third group of surcharge proposals for road traffic offenders. I shall outline my amendments on the subject. When the Home Secretary said what he was going to do, his proposal did not let people realise that committing a second endorsable offence of itself would be sufficient to trigger the surcharge. As the noble Baroness says, that is within a three-year period. I accept entirely her argument about why it should be three and not five; the amendment was intended only to elicit that explanation.
Amendments Nos. 10B and 10C are devices to ask the Minister certain questions. First, when do you get a penalty notice? What for? Much of the Commons debate and the remarks of the noble Baroness today have related to speed cameras. I am at one with the
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noble Baroness on that: I accept, and always have, that speeding can be dangerous, especially in urban areas. I am arguing for transparency in sentencing and revenue raising. I am not arguing for an open sesame for boy-racers or girl-racers; however, I am certainly not arguing for an open sesame for the Government, who are desperate to find stealthier ways of getting extra funds. We all want victims' services properly funded, but I am not convinced that this is necessarily the right way to go about it.
There are plenty of other offences apart from speeding for which one could face the surcharge; for example, having your tyres under-inflated or over-inflated. The Government's definition of a "serious and persistent criminal" seems rather grotesque, because it includes someone who gets stopped twice in three years, perhaps for having under-inflated tyres. The Government argued in the other place that that was pretty much a middle-class crime and therefore it was okay to slap on a surcharge for the middle classes to pay up to assist victims of crime generally. I am glad that the noble Baroness did not take that line; it was not a particularly helpful one. It could well be the single parent on low income, who can just about afford an ancient runabout to take her children to school or the hospital and does not always have the tyres at the right pressure at the right time, who could be affected by this surcharge.
My second question is: how much will the penalty be? The noble Baroness has said that it will be only a small amount. That was a little coy, because in the other place sums of £5, £10 and £30 were bandied around. We were told, "We will let it run and then the Government will decide". By negative resolution they will be able to increase the amount when they wish. Surely the danger is that, if we all do as the noble Baroness says and think twice before speeding—I shall try; I have no points on my licence yet, but that is not through virtue—and become considerate drivers so that the government income from the fines goes down, surely the Government will be tempted to raise the surcharge to keep up the trickle of money into the fund to help victims. That would not be a transparent system.
My final question has not yet been addressed by the noble Baroness. When exactly does a surcharge fall due to be paid by the motorist? I shall take as an example a relatively common scenario, which I faced as a magistrate. One might be stopped for speeding once, say, for travelling at 36 m.p.h. in a 30 m.p.h. limit in one year, and within three years one is then stopped for having two tyres under-inflated and one tyre over-inflated. That is two occasions but four endorsable offences. If the surcharge is £5, does the person pay £5, £10 or whatever multiple thereafter?
The reason that I ask that question is because the noble Baroness's colleague Mr Goggins was less than clear in another place. He started off by saying that it would be clear:
"It will be clear that the second endorsable offence, not the value of the penalty points, will attract the surcharge".
Did he leave out the word "not"? I do not know. He went on to say,
"twice is once too often, whether it is on the same day or over a period of three years".—[Official Report, Commons, 27/10/04; cols. 1506-08.]
It did not sound as though Mr Goggins quite knew whether it was two occasions, four offences or how it would be worked out. I beg to move this probing amendment.
Moved, as an amendment to Commons Amendment No. 8, Amendment No. 8A.—(Baroness Anelay of St Johns.)
Lord Carlisle of Bucklow: My Lords, I find this very strange. Like other noble Lords, I took part in the Committee stage of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill, which was looked at line by line, as happens in Committee. Then, suddenly, without any reference at all, the Government in the House of Commons start adding clauses which had never been mentioned, have never been considered by noble Lords and have no direct relationship to the Bill. Three of them deal with surcharges. I should have thought that these three clauses would have cried out for careful examination in Committee. So far as I am concerned, the principle itself is very dubious.
The principle as I understand it is that anybody who appears before a court and is convicted of a criminal offence, if he is not mentally affected or granted an absolute discharge, will be subject to paying a surcharge. Equally, anyone driving a motorcar who has one speeding offence as a result of travelling past a speed camera, maybe on an open road in the early hours of the morning, and who commits a similar speeding offence during the following three years will immediately become subject automatically to a surcharge.
What is the surcharge for? The Minister, Mr Goggins, told us:
"Our aim is to make offenders pay a small sum to a fund for the victims of crime. The fund will provide practical and emotional support to a range of victims".—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee E, 1/7/04; col. 293.]
Why should there be a greater responsibility on someone who has committed a second motoring offence, for example, to pay for the establishment of a fund to deal with the emotional support needed by an elderly lady who is, say, the victim of a burglary? Surely, it is society's duty to provide support for victims. Whether or not you have committed a second fixed-penalty offence seems totally irrelevant and in no way increases the responsibility of that individual to compensate that victim.
Who will be the victims? We are told that the fund will provide practical and emotional support for a range of victims. There is no provision for the establishment of a victims' fund. Who is to decide who the victims are? Is it to be Victim Support with more money from the Government than before? I declare now an interest that I would have had to declare later in any event as a former chairman of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. Is it merely a method of increasing the money available to the Criminal Injuries
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Compensation Authority to compensate for the substantial cut in the budget that, I understand, it has received in the past few months?
What is the principle behind it? The Minister said that it was right that people should pay for their crimes. Of course they should, but I still do not understand why someone who is convicted of an offence of, say, shoplifting or drinking after hours should be more responsible than society as a whole to the victim of a wounding. The principle is highly questionable.
What about the practicality? First, there is the intention to surcharge the offender. As my noble friend Lady Anelay of St Johns asked, does that mean that, in future, everybody who is sentenced by any court to a term of imprisonment will, as well as being sent to prison, have a surcharge imposed on him? If that is so, is that not, as my noble friend said, contrary, in many ways, to the principle used in the past by the courts that if a person is incarcerated for his offence, we should not add a financial penalty?
The new clause does not say, "a court may"; it says, "a court ... must". Presumably, anybody who is imprisoned for any offence, however serious and however long the sentence, will be surcharged. We are not told the amount, but he will have to pay a sum that will ensure that, when he comes out, he will have no money left with which to start, if he wishes, to live an honest life. It is an extraordinary proposal.
What about the motorist? Again, everyone who is convicted of an offence carrying a fixed penalty will, as I understand the proposals, be ordered to pay a surcharge. I agree with the Minister that motoring offences are serious. I agree with her that those who commit more than one motoring offence are a serious problem. I am not sure, however, that I would necessarily describe a person who committed one offence of speeding and one of having a bald tyre as a repeat offender.
If the view is that speeding for a second time is more serious than speeding the first time, why not put up the fixed penalty? The fixed penalty for a first offence is £60. In future, for a second offence, it will be £60 and something called a surcharge, amounting to £30. If we are concerned at the gravity of the offence, we should put up the fixed penalty to £90, rather than dressing the increase up by pretending that it is a surcharge that goes, in an unexplained way, through a victims' fund, which is not to be established, to help with the emotional and practical problems of victims of crime who have no relationship to the individual who has committed the speeding offence or driven with bald tyres.
I have spoken longer than I should have, but the proposal is nonsense in principle and will be shown in practice to be unworkable.
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