It is a pleasure to see you chairing our proceedings today, Miss Begg. This is an important debate about the sentencing options available to our criminal courts, and I am glad that we shall be under your watchful eye as you take care of us with your usual compassion and attention to detail. I am also pleased that my hon. Friend the Minister will listen to today’s contributions and respond to the debate. She is conscientious and diligent in carrying out her ministerial duties, and she will want to take close account of what is said. I hope that she will be able to respond positively to some of my points.

About 1.3 million adults are sentenced each year in the courts of England and Wales. In addition, children and young people appear before the courts, and about 120,000 court disposals were reported in 2006-07 involving them. Overall, since 1997, the number of crimes, including violent crime, is down, and last year, the number of deaths that the police reported as homicides was down to an eight-year low. The debate presents us with an opportunity not only to consider what to do for the future, but to pay tribute to those who work so diligently and with such commitment to serve the public through their work in, and for, the criminal justice system.

I very much support the police in their work. They play a pivotal role at every stage, from keeping the peace, through detecting crime, apprehending offenders, securing the evidence for convictions, enforcing bail conditions and taking part in the management of offenders subject to restrictions post-sentence, to playing their part to the full in multi-agency work, which includes persistent and prolific-offender programmes, such as the one I have visited four times in Stafford, and assessments of public protection and risk.

In addition to the police, the Crown Prosecution Service works conscientiously to secure fair trials, convictions of the guilty and advice to courts on appropriate sentences. Working with the police and agencies such as Victim Support, it ensures that victims feel as involved in the process as they want to be and that the system places them and their interests at its heart. At least, that is the ambition. The last time we had Question Time to the Solicitor-General, I asked him whether he was yet satisfied that the CPS consistently achieves that aim. I hope that we will continue to give attention principally to the interests of victims in the criminal justice system.

To carry on with my praise for those involved in the system, professional and lay judges bear heavy responsibility for decisions on guilt and innocence, bail and sentences, with a barrage of ill-informed criticism awaiting them when a decision is wrong or, with the benefit of hindsight, shown to be inadequate. Prison staff have a tough job keeping dangerous and violent people safely under lock and key and having an eye for vulnerable individuals who are not coping with imprisonment. They work tirelessly to improve the prospects of those leaving prison, so that they leave free from drug or alcohol misuse and with educational skills that they lacked on entry, and which will, we hope, assist them to be supported after release, especially in such crucial matters as housing, work and relationships.

In the community, probation staff do phenomenal work with offenders. The risks are obvious given that there can hardly be 24-hour supervision, which is no doubt why so many probation officers give 110 per cent. effort to their work, routinely going beyond the call of duty, patiently working with offenders when others might feel like giving up on them, and securing benefits for the community at large by reducing offending, supervising payback and educating the public about sentencing.

Then there is the Youth Justice Board and the many youth offending teams up and down the country, which perform so valiantly as they seek to divert children and young people from what might otherwise become a life of crime. Given the prolific nature of some offending, they are truly in the forefront of efforts to protect the public. As someone who took part in the many parliamentary debates about the creation of the National Offender Management Service, I know only too well that many other organisations contribute a huge amount to the work that goes on to reduce offending, to give effect to court sentences and to support victims of crime—organisations such as Victim Support, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders and Rainer. No doubt there are many other groups and organisations that I have omitted to praise. I acknowledge the fantastic work that they all do, and I mean them no discourtesy by not naming them individually.

I turn to the situation in our prisons and to imprisonment as a sentence. In my view, and I think that of most people, prisons should be reserved for dangerous and violent offenders. The public demand protection from dangerous people and severe punishment for people who commit heinous crimes. Prisons are full, partly because sentences are longer. Indeterminate sentences keep very dangerous offenders in prison longer, and those who breach their licence conditions after early release are much more likely to be returned to prison. That ought to give the public some reassurance that prison provides the right deterrent and punishment for dangerous people.

However, the near doubling of the prison population in the past decade has created enormous pressures—not just financial cost to the state and the need to build more prisons, but the early release of prisoners and subtle pressure on sentencers. Faced with a case that is borderline but for which prison may be the right sentence, courts are given the message that there are no places in prison. We should consider ways to keep out of prison people who are not dangerous and who should be dealt with by community sentences. For non-violent women, imprisonment should be avoided when possible, for all the reasons that the Corston review recently set out. We should do much more to keep children out of prisons and comply with the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. In addition to working hard to keep women and children out of prison, we should provide alternatives to prison for people who do not pay fines, those with learning difficulties and those with a mental illness. Drugs and alcohol fuel crime, and there should be earlier access to health care outside prison.

I wish to focus primarily on community sentences and other community solutions. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 helpfully sets out the purposes of sentencing in most cases. They are fivefold: punishment, reduction of crime, reform and rehabilitation of offenders, protection of the public and reparation by offenders to persons affected by their crimes. I enumerate them, but as I recall from the debates on the Act—I was closely involved in every stage of its parliamentary proceedings—the five were not intended to be in sequence. Each was to be weighed against the others by the sentencing court.

How are we doing on the five purposes? Lord Woolf was asked that question by the Select Committee on Home Affairs when he gave evidence to it on 17 April 2007. He said:

“Perhaps we achieve the punishment of offenders, but when we look at the other four our record is very poor.”

He indicated the difficulty of reforming and rehabilitating prisoners when prisons are overcrowded and there is pressure on staff to deliver the courses needed. He believes that reparation solutions are underdeveloped and that we are not protecting the public sufficiently if we do not prevent reoffending effectively. I shall develop his arguments and suggest that there are ways in which we can do better.

The aims of sentencing are best met when the period that elapses between the crime and the disposal is as short as possible. That is true especially when the offender is young, but it holds good for many crimes, irrespective of the offender’s age. The public understand that argument and expect the Government, Parliament and the criminal justice system to make criminal cases shorter. Back in 1997, in the heady days of winning my first election to Parliament, I found that that message really resonated with the public. I remember Labour’s five pledges on the little pledge card that we used to give out to people. One was to halve the time that it took to bring young offenders to court for their sentences. That resonated with the public because they understood the importance of keeping the distance between offence and sentence as short as possible. When only a little time elapses between the commission of the offence and the offender facing up to the consequences of it, the connection between wrongdoing and payback is strong for both the offender and the victim. That is why, in appropriate cases, fixed penalty notices and restorative justice can be so powerful. The former is self-explanatory, but I shall say more about the latter.

There is now well-defined practice and law for restorative justice in cases involving children and young persons. A restorative justice order can even be made in a court. For adults, the position is less clear and the powerful tool of restorative justice does not play the role that it should in our criminal justice system. In Staffordshire, Chief Inspector Mark Riley has applied restorative justice solutions since 1994, and he is positive about their benefits. He told me:

“The Victim often feels much better about the outcome, for even if they do not get recompense from the Offender, the fact that they have been able to ‘Get it off their chest’ is very cathartic for them.

The Offender will obviously ‘benefit’ as they do not get a conviction out of the process, although the emotional trauma that they go through in the RJ process and the fact that they have to apologise for their actions often means that they comment about it not being a soft option.”

The upsides of using restorative justice include, first, that it is victim-centred; the needs of victims are addressed and victims have a say in how the process should be carried out, so it empowers them rather than leaving them on the sidelines. Secondly, it is possible to hold group sessions—for example, in antisocial behaviour cases. Thirdly, it can involve all the interested parties and improve communication between different parts of the community. Fourthly, it can address long-standing complaints within communities as well as specific incidents.

There are downsides, however, some of which we can address. In a police performance culture, restorative justice does not count as detection. The Government have recently begun to get a grip on that problem by releasing the police from over-prescriptive targets on detection. That is welcome, but, as with other community punishments and diversions from court, it is important that the community, the police and the criminal justice system all feel that restorative justice brings as positive a result as a court sentence would have achieved.

A second downside is that it takes the police as long to resolve a restorative justice case as to prepare a full file for court. A third is that too few police officers are trained to facilitate restorative justice, which requires experience and skill to make it work in the victim’s favour. However, training is available to those who want to pursue that outlet. Mark Riley referred me to Inspector Tony Walker of Thames Valley police, who trained him, so I sought out Inspector Walker and spoke to him about restorative justice. I am told that Thames Valley police is probably the best police force in the country at developing restorative justice as a solution. When I spoke to Inspector Walker yesterday, he was extremely enthusiastic about it as a general solution that ought to be widely available in criminal cases. He reports that through his use of restorative justice, there have been immense reductions in repeat and serial offending as well as reductions in crime in a problem area.

There should be well-defined practices for offenders to apologise to victims and to hear what effect their crimes have had on their victims, and perhaps to pay compensation or do unpaid work for their victims. However, it should be clear which cases are suitable for that approach, and care should be taken to prevent its use where it would be dangerous or counter-productive. There should also be sufficient training of police officers and other facilitators to remove lack of capacity as an excuse for not using restorative justice. When restorative justice is the right solution, it ought to count as a successful conclusion to a case.

Conditional cautions do not involve going to court to get a sentence. The Government place great store in conditional cautioning as a vehicle to achieve greater use of restorative justice. It will become universally available to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in April after a period of trialling, including in Staffordshire. Police in Staffordshire who have experience of conditional cautioning speak positively about it. Will the Minister explain the Government’s intentions regarding conditional cautioning from April onwards, when it becomes widely available? How much does she anticipate it will be used? Looking back at the pilots and trials, what assessment has been made of its success to date, and what success is predicted for the future?

I recently asked the Minister about conditional cautioning in a written question. In her reply, she stated that the

“compliance rate is about 6 per cent.”—[Official Report, 29 January 2008; Vol. 471, c. 292W.]

That sounds quite worrying, and it does not make much sense. If a conditional caution means that the police and the CPS have agreed that if a certain course of action has been taken, a caution will follow, non-compliance does not apply because there will be no caution if the required work is not carried out. I am not sure what the phrase means, so I would be grateful if the Minister will clarify that point.

Conditional cautioning is quick and cuts out court sentencing altogether. I am content with that as long as the scheme meets other important public policy and sentencing objectives. Crucially, if that method of disposal is used regularly, there must be accountability about how it is used, so that there is no abuse. Statistics must be collected and published to ensure transparency.

Although the debate is about sentencing, I have been talking about ways of keeping sentencing out of the hands of judges, which some people will think is good and others will think is bad. Before I discuss courts’ sentencing powers, I shall say a little more about court diversion and other ways of resolving cases. There are methods that meet all the aims of sentencing policy and wider public protection, but which are quick and cut out the need for court proceedings; for example, drivers who are caught exceeding the speed limit may, in defined circumstances, pay to go on a speed awareness course and avoid fines and points on their driving licences—as can drivers who are caught driving without due care and attention. Such schemes have led me to consider where similar practices could be used.

I recently asked some parliamentary questions about military training, which is given both to armed forces personnel and to members of the public by way of outreach work by the military. In reply to one of my written questions, the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), told me that there is a military corrective training centre at Colchester that

“exists to retrain and rehabilitate service personnel who have offended”.—[Official Report, 22 January 2008; Vol. 470, c. 1840W.]

There is also an outreach programme to help vulnerable young people outside the military, and young people could join the cadet forces that operate widely in the UK.

I know from my experiences of cadet forces in Staffordshire that they are run on a shoestring. I regularly visit the military base at Stafford, where the Army cadets train, and I am the honorary president of the Penkridge air cadets, so I regularly visit their training centre too. I have seen the brilliant work that is done with youngsters to give them discipline, a sense of purpose, recognised qualifications and Duke of Edinburgh awards. As a result of their training, some young people have the ambition of joining our armed forces, and they are well placed to be recruited because of the skills and qualifications that they have acquired.

Cadet force instructors are incredible people. Some of them volunteer completely, giving all their time for free, while others receive payment for some of their work, but do miles more than they are paid to do. We could not ask our overstretched military forces to do more with their money and pay for the kind of training courses that I am talking about, so we need to consider how we could fund such a solution. I am interested in that as a way of diverting people from a life of crime and certainly from an appearance in court. If by training people and putting them straight, the military gained a new way of recruiting suitable armed forces personnel, that would be an added bonus.

The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson) recently told me in a written answer:

“We are consulting with a range of organisations which have an interest in youth justice and the provision of youth justice services as part of the Youth Crime Action Plan which will be published in the summer, and will consider the feasibility of sending young offenders on training programmes by the armed services in light of the response to that consultation.”—[Official Report, 28 January 2008; Vol. 471, c. 154W.]

Therefore, this is not an out-of-field suggestion; it is under consideration. For some non-violent, antisocial offences, offenders could choose to go on training courses run by the military rather than going to court for sentencing. Such a scheme would apply mostly to young offenders, but need not be exclusively for young people.

Nor need we stop at the military as providers of suitable training courses, such as the one that I just described. In Staffordshire, for example, the fire and rescue service runs a young firefighters training course. Those identified to take the course are young people in danger of social exclusion and those whose behaviour shows them to be in danger of becoming involved in crime.

Can we not consider whether more providers are ready and willing to take part in schemes that have the backing and recognition of law? Could public sector bodies develop appropriate courses? Might there be private sector offers as well? Third-sector providers such as Rainer and the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders are already involved with similar projects.

Those are my suggestions for taking the weight of sentencing off the court, but when we come to community sentencing itself, we must look at how we can make the process speedier. Beyond the early disposal of cases without a court hearing at all, existing community sentences ought to be adapted—adjusted by Parliament—to make possible a sentence that specifies attendance on training courses, such as the ones that I described, as a whole or a part of the court disposal. That would be in addition to the more than 6 million hours of unpaid work that are already carried out in the community each year.

On that work, it is time that we settled whether payback is the brand for all reparation work that is ordered by the courts and carried out by offenders for the victims and the community more widely. We ought to ensure that there is much more labelling of the public property that is repaired or paid for by offenders as a result of such orders, and of community projects that have been completed by offenders undertaking unpaid work at the order of a court. In that way, the public would see constant reminders, as they went about their everyday business, that people had been caught, punished through the courts and made to do work to pay back the community for what they did. That would help us to inform and educate the public about crimes being detected and successfully prosecuted, and community sentences being served as a result. The public would then have a sense of the criminal justice system working for them, and punishment would be successfully allied with payback.

One important aim of reducing reoffending is making people pay for what they have done wrong, but I appreciate that the National Offender Management Service has developed seven pathways for reducing reoffending. To remind hon. Members of the full list, NOMS deals with accommodation; education, training and employment; health; drugs and alcohol; finance, benefits and debt; children and families; and attitudes, thinking and behaviour. All are clearly important, and all require the speedy responses that I mentioned earlier.

Alongside thinking about how we can quickly deliver a community sentence at the end of the process, I would like to deal with speeding up the procedures to get to the end of the process. That links up with my argument about keeping to a minimum the period between the offence and the sentence. It is important that we continue to encourage initiatives that are already taking place.

The first and most obvious initiative is to free the police from unnecessary burdens of bureaucracy to allow them more time on the front line to do the work that we need them to do, of reassuring the public, catching criminals and keeping the peace. The Flanagan review, which has just been made public, makes important recommendations about cutting police “blue tape”. I am pleased to say that Staffordshire is actually pushing the Home Office to let it be at the forefront of implementing Flanagan recommendations to cut bureaucracy and free police to do the quality policing that the public want from them. That initiative would speed up the whole process.

The second initiative, which has already begun but needs to be recognised and encouraged, is the excellent practice of co-locating police and prosecutors, thereby getting much earlier and more accurate decisions on the right charges and the right cases to take forward for prosecution. Allied to the successful co-operation between the police and the prosecution has been the development of low-bureaucracy court files for the most straightforward cases. Again, that takes away some of the excuses for unnecessary delays and the resulting adjournments in proceedings.

There have been several experiments with specialist courts such as those for drugs and domestic violence cases, and there has even been talk of courts for mental health cases. As long as we assess the effectiveness of each, and as long as they do not divert resources that would be more effectively used for the mainstream business of courts, there is a lot to be said for developing expertise in each of those areas to speed up court proceedings.

Another initiative that my friends in the Staffordshire police are enthusiastic about, having now witnessed it, is the virtual court. The police officer and the accused can remain at the police station. They are in touch with the court by a video link, and the whole process is got out of the way and dealt with without moving outside the custody suite in the police station.

Those are procedures that we are already developing and adapting in this country to speed up the process. They should be welcomed and encouraged to take greater hold. If we speed up the process, and ultimately get effective community sentence orders from the court, it is important to ensure that those orders are then carried out effectively. There is no point in Members of Parliament such as me suggesting additional and refined sentencing powers if the existing ones are not already being used, where appropriate. I take that lesson from last month’s report by the National Audit Office, which states:

“Not all components of community orders are used in all probation areas.”

Why is that? What is wrong? Why are people given powers to operate and then not able to use them? The NAO finds that community orders are effective, that they offer benefits over other court sentences and that they can reduce reconviction rates. Contrary to popular belief, most sentences are completed—94 per cent., according to the NAO report, although, to be absolutely open and complete, it states that 94 per cent. are completed, breached or revoked.

The report revealed a particular weakness in the use of one component of a community order: alcohol treatment. Given the concerns that members of the public have about how much of today’s offending behaviour is fuelled by alcohol consumption, such a weakness is particularly inappropriate. The report says that the availability of the alcohol treatment component varies greatly across the country, and it identifies responsibilities not just in the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office but in the Department of Health and, at the local level, for primary care trusts and the deliverers of health services. NHS involvement means that Justice Ministers need to work conscientiously and as hard as they can across Government to ensure that the funding and facilities are in place to make alcohol treatment available everywhere.

The final area that I wish to cover is parenting. I have learned in a lifetime of experiences, and as a lawyer who dealt with divorce cases, family dispute cases and public law cases involving children being taken away from their parents, that the first three years of everybody’s life is the most crucial in determining how they will perform and behave throughout the rest of their life. One of the many experts whom I have heard speak said that we learn up to half of all that we ever learn, however long we live, in the first three years of life.

Many people spout on about how schools and education can solve a lot of the problems of children who might be growing up with identified weaknesses. However, the starting age for school is five, reception classes are offered at four and a child may be able to get into a nursery at three, so nobody is near a school in the vital years from nought to three. Who are the vital educators during those years? The parents. That is so blindingly obvious, yet some parents do not understand how important they are. I want to look at ways of reducing offending behaviour by starting at the right point—at year zero—with every new citizen.

Of course, this is a debate about sentencing, and we have an option called a parenting order, but that would be aimed at the parents of a youth—perhaps a teenager—who has offended. I am sure that those orders can sometimes be useful at that stage, but there needs to be rigorous enforcement of attendance and participation by parents. It is at that stage that we might find that the absence of parents or their inability to take part is the reason that we have a problem in society. Nevertheless, where parenting orders are used, we need to be as rigorous as possible in getting a whole-family approach to tackling the offending behaviour of the person who has been in trouble with the law.

Parenting orders represent an intervention some way down the line, after the offending behaviour by the child has become established. I have been attracted to the work of an international charity called Wave. A report co-written by Professor George Hosking in 2005 draws a number of conclusions about how a public health approach to crime prevention in those first three years of children’s lives could lead to a great reduction in violent behaviour and offending in later life.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing an important matter to the House in a balanced, eloquent manner. However, does he share my concern that over the past few decades, as the state has become more involved in parenting—for instance, it has prevented the loving chastisement of children by pulling them up or slapping them on the back of the leg when they are doing wrong—we have seen the growth not only of bad behaviour and crime among youngsters as they grow up, but of violent crime?

No, not really. Of course, I share all the concerns that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned—that is the point of my mentioning parenting in a debate about court sentencing—but the use of violence by a parent to reinforce discipline reflects completely the wrong attitude. Violence between a parent and a child is a sign of failure and of pushing the child away from the parent, instead of their being drawn in and loved and cared for. I do not share his analysis of what the right solution to the problem is, although I agree that there is a problem. I should like to expand a little on that to show what I mean.

I have more time than I thought, so I should like to say a little more about the 2005 Wave report, which concluded, among other things, that serious violence in England and Wales is rising and that that trend can be reversed by effective early interventions focusing on the period from pregnancy to the age of three. Another conclusion of the report, which is the result of nine years’ research—this is not something that has been considered lightly—is that the propensity to violence is developed primarily from wrong treatment before the age of three.

We should explain to every parent how important those first three years are, to equip them with the skills and the outside support that they feel that they need, entirely through their choice. However, the danger is the nanny state, which was the point that the hon. Gentleman was drawing me towards. I understand that it is for each parent to do their job and carry out their responsibilities, but as a society it is our job to make them appreciate what their role is and give them support when they feel that they need it. It is entirely for them to choose whether they need it or not. However, if parents fail in their job, when their children end up in the court system we must hold them to account as well as their children. That is the incentive for them to pay attention when we give them such messages.

In my constituency, I have been promoting for Staffordshire a universal parenting support service that is available to all parents. Universality is important. We should not try to stigmatise bad parents, because that would simply drive them away from us. We need to say that every parent reaches a point when they need somebody to turn to and there is nothing wrong with people turning to help that is already available for them. That is what I would like to achieve. However, that does not mean adding some new agency of the state. In my constituency, health visitors, midwives, general practitioners’ practice nurses, churches and organisations such as Home-Start already exist: it is about branding them, drawing them together and offering support. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) is doing similar creative work in Nottingham, trying to make it the early intervention city, precisely on the same reasoning that I am using. That is a very important way forward.

There are some recommendations at the end of the Wave report, based on research and hard evidence from around the world, about some of the responses that we ought to consider applying as a matter of course in this country: a course called “Roots of empathy”, drawn from successful practice in Canada, prepares parents-to-be while they are still schoolchildren; a British charity, Parents in Partnership Parent Infant Network, prepares parents-to-be during the first pregnancy; in the United States of America, the Nurse-Family Partnership supports first-time parents from pregnancy onwards; and there is also an internationally known approach called the “circle of security”, which is a group-based parent intervention programme to increase sensitivity between parents and children. All those ideas already exist. The Wave report says simply:

“Debate is invited on the merits of a focused, national crime prevention agency to co-ordinate, fund and drive effective early prevention strategies.”

It is calling for a debate about what is the most effective use of our money.

I attended a presentation by Professor George Hosking at which he showed that intervention in a child’s life had the greatest effect from nought to three years old. He superimposed on that profile the spending by the state on children’s upbringing. The biggest payment that we make as a state is when children are 15, 16 or 17 and the smallest payment is when they are aged from nought to three. Yet the greatest intervention that we could make is at nought to three. We ought to think about whether we should make changes. I say to the Minister that it is important to work across Government to get the right solutions.

I have been speaking for quite a while because I am the only Back Bencher who wants to make a full speech, but I will come to my conclusions now. Another great connection that Labour made with voters in 1997 was through the promise of being “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. We have certainly been tough on crime in terms of more and longer prison sentences. That seems to be Lord Woolf’s conclusion as well. We have been tough on some of the societal causes of crime, for example, cutting worklessness, rough sleeping and poverty. But my connection with my public in my Stafford constituency tells me that other causes of crime have been under-addressed. People often mention a loss of discipline, a decline in standards of behaviour in public and binge drinking.

For me, discipline starts with good parenting and upbringing. Upholding decent standards of behaviour calls for a genuine zero tolerance of annoying public crimes such as damage to property, graffiti, litter, public disorder and antisocial behaviour. Tackling binge drinking requires determination to stop supermarkets selling alcohol below cost price.

I want accommodation, health care and help getting a job to be available to people at risk of offending before they commit an offence. I want those who wish to face up to their drugs and alcohol misuse helped to overcome their addiction before they embark on a rash of acquisitive crimes to feed their habit. Sometimes, people commit such crimes precisely to access one or more of those supports because they cannot get them soon enough as law-abiding citizens. That is wrong. As I have said, a cross-Government approach is required to achieve such outcomes.

It is the responsibility of Back-Bench and Opposition Members of Parliament, as elected representatives of the British people, to exert pressure on the Government to take the right actions, facilitate the passing of the laws that are needed and scrutinise the resultant use of funding and other resources to make sure that the taxpayer gets best value. Above all, it is our responsibility to bring about safer communities and a safer Britain.

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, Miss Begg, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) on securing it. The hon. Gentleman has a long history, in his career in the House, of raising issues of this kind and speaking with a great deal of intelligence and commitment on matters associated with criminal justice. He and I, and the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), are veterans of too many criminal justice Bills for our own good. Nevertheless, we have frequently had the opportunity to debate such issues.

The hon. Gentleman is right to look at sentencing in the context of what happens beforehand. I was pleased that he paid tribute to a large number of the participants in the process, including the police. Sentences cannot be imposed until a criminal is before a court, and my view has always been that the greatest deterrent to crime is the expectation of being caught, but sadly that has not been the case for far too long.

The hon. Gentleman was also right when he said that we have not paid enough attention—the Government have certainly not done so—to the causes of crime, particularly the elements that he described, and parenting is a large component of that. I do not want to be misunderstood in suggesting that there is an hereditary component to crime, and I am certainly not talking about a genetic predisposition; I am talking about a behavioural element, because there is undoubtedly learned behaviour from parents and peer groups. If that disjunction can be cracked, intervention at an early age is more likely to reduce people’s potential to find themselves in a life of crime. That is not universally the case, and some parents have done everything that might be expected of them, but still find their children in trouble with the law. I do not want my suggestion to be considered an absolute, but the hon. Gentleman is right in saying that we have not yet sufficiently considered the idea.

The hon. Gentleman may recall that in 1997, I introduced a private Member’s measure on underage drinking and confiscation of alcohol, which is now much talked about and much used—probably the most used law in the land, apart from traffic regulations. Is he aware that the legislation tried to ensure that when removing alcohol from young people, police officers would always tell the parents and involve them so that they could take control action with their youngsters? That provision has not been widely used until now, but does he welcome the fact that at last the Home Secretary has woken up to it, and is telling the police to use that facility?

I certainly welcome that, but I also recognise the practical problems for a single officer or pair of officers on the beat in towns such as Frome in my constituency on a Friday evening. I have been out on patrol with the police, and there are many underage drinkers on the streets in Frome on Friday nights. Dealing with them is a problem, and my question is: why do parents not ask why a 13 or 14-year-old is not at home well past midnight, and why, when they finally return, they are legless? That returns to the point made by the hon. Member for Stafford about parenting and the expected norms in exercising a little parental control. However, that is a slight diversion from what we are discussing: sentencing policy.

I am pleased that among his bouquets, the hon. Gentleman handed one to the lay magistracy, because we often do not recognise its extraordinarily difficult and unpaid job, and the value that it adds to society.

What should we look for in sentencing? My starting point throughout my forays into home affairs and justice matters is to ask whether it is effective in reducing crime. That is the whole point of a criminal justice system. If it does not reduce offending, it is not doing its job effectively. Secondly, we are entitled to expect some consistency throughout the country and in relation to specific crimes, so that there is an underlying feeling about the justice of the outcome for any specific disposal. Thirdly, we must allow discretion. It is not for Parliament or the Government to prescribe in minute detail the outcome of a court case. There is no point in wise people sitting in judgment if they cannot take account of the evidence before them and the circumstances of the crime in question. Such discretion is an important part of the principles of justice.

Fourthly, we should seek more transparency, which returns us to the argument we often have in this place about honesty in sentencing. We should describe sentences in a way that everyone inside and outside the courts understands, so that they are not dismayed by the realisation that when we say someone will serve 20 years in prison, they are released after five or six years, and that a 20-year sentence is not in fact a 20-year sentence, or that a life sentence is not for life. We need honesty in sentencing, and that can be achieved in the way in which we describe sentences, rather than by any major change in the nature of sentences. Finally, we must have centrality in sentencing from the victims’ point of view, and their concerns must be put before the court, understood by the court and, if possible, addressed by the court.

For many years we have concentrated far too much on custodial sentences as the only “proper” sentences that work. Custodial sentences undoubtedly have a part to play, and are the only effective sentence for protecting the public from a dangerous criminal who is likely to reoffend, so it is essential that such sentences play a part in our penal process. However, the hon. Gentleman was right in saying that they are often used when they are not the best disposal, although his argument that because more people are breaking their licences and being returned to prison, the public should be reassured that prison is working was rather difficult to understand in logical terms. I suggest that it may do the opposite.

Why are our prisons so overcrowded? Why do they so often fail in their primary duty of rehabilitation, re-education and the reduction of recidivism? They contain far too many people with mental health problems who should be in secure mental health units. They contain far too many people with drug and alcohol dependency issues that should be treated rather than simply reinforced, as, sadly, they often are in the prison estate. Far too many women are in prison. Baroness Corston’s report clearly shows that women who do not represent a danger to the public are often imprisoned inappropriately for lower level offences. There are certainly too many children in our prisons. There are better ways of dealing with children, and there is ample evidence that prison does not work in reducing offending in children. The reverse is the case.

Too many people are serving short-term sentences when all the evidence is that such sentences are almost certain to result in a reoffending individual. Why on earth do we spend enormous amounts of public money on putting people into prison for a very short time when they can have no opportunity for education or rehabilitation, and when they reoffend almost immediately after being released? Some of the figures show that reoffending rates exceed 90 per cent., and that includes only those who are caught. The system simply does not work in its primary purpose, so why do we spend enormous amounts of money on pursuing a policy that does not work?

The hon. Gentleman asks an important question: why do sentencers send people to prison for short periods even though they know that it will not help to reduce reoffending? What is his answer? My answer is that it is because until recently there has been lack of confidence in community alternatives, although the trend is beginning to change. My contribution is about trying to create even more confidence in the community sentence alternative.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I was just about to mention that issue. There are better possibilities for effective community sentences, but the problem is that until recently the Government have appeared not to believe in such proposals and the public do not believe in them either. We need to establish in the public mind the fact that community sentencing can be rigorous and effective and do the job as well, or better, than a custodial sentence. To do that we need to re-examine the way in which we deal with community sentencing.

There are some high-intensity schemes with prolific offenders that operate in the community. Such schemes cost a lot of money and are not undemanding in terms of resources, but it has been shown that they can reduce offending among a notoriously difficult group of offenders. In Bristol, a scheme has been operating for some time with, interestingly, the police as the prime movers, although they work with other agencies. I used to be the chairman of Avon and Somerset police authority and am impressed by what the force has been doing. I would like to see more such schemes, but I recognise that there needs to be a large resource for them to work effectively. There will, of course, be failures; we are talking about prolific offenders who have been to prison and come out. We should deal with a comparator that makes sense in terms of the general public, but nevertheless such schemes have been shown to be more effective than simply a lock-them-up-and-forget-about-them approach.

What would make community sentencing more acceptable in terms of public perception? The hon. Gentleman mentioned some points in relation to that. Immediacy is important, as is propinquity to the offence and the community that is affected because that means there is a relationship between the offence and the offended community or individual. Visibility is also important. We must make community sentencing more visible so that the public realise that it is not a soft touch, but a way of directly making amends for the crime in the community in which it has been committed. If we put those factors together, there is likely to be greater public acceptability. The restorative element, whether within a formal community sentence or outside it, is extraordinarily important and we should find ways to incorporate it so the person who is arrested for graffiti is seen to clean up the graffiti that he or she created. The restorative element is important for establishing public confidence and there are many examples of that kind.

The hon. Gentleman is right: it is often most difficult for the offender to come to terms with the restorative element. When an offender has to come face to face with the victim and say how sorry they are, they realise how much their action has affected that individual.

The worst argument for community sentencing is simply to say that it is needed because our prisons are full. I am worried about much of what has recently happened because there have been some quite arbitrary measures. Rather than having confidence that community sentencing is a better disposal, people have been saying, “Well, we haven’t got enough room in prisons so we will require our magistracy or judges to use community sentencing more”. I hope that will not be the case in future, but it worries me. The Lord Chancellor has set up a review of sentencing, on the basis of the Sentencing Guidelines Council, which will consider the relationship between sentencing and penal provision. The Lord Chancellor appears to have pre-empted that review in his speech last week in America—I think it was at George Washington university—where he appeared to say, “Well, we want to go the way of the American model where in some states there is a direct relationship between cell availability and sentencing policy”. I question that approach. It may work in Minnesota or Michigan—it is a state beginning with M, but I cannot remember which one—but it will not work for us. Such a policy is not right in principle either, because if somebody is a threat to the community, they should be in prison; if they are not a threat, we should consider the alternatives and ensure that they work effectively.

Other disposals are below the level of formal court hearings, such as disposals at neighbourhood courts or at a peer group level. That sort of thing has been experimented with; for example, a restorative justice panel in Chard, Somerset, has worked well. Recidivism levels are well below those of a normal court dealing with the same sort of individual because there is a relationship between the offender, the offended against and the community. We need to consider such proposals, explore their effectiveness and see how far they can be expanded.

A further level below court, to which the hon. Gentleman referred and about which he is slightly more enthusiastic than I am, is that of summary measures taken by a police officer or prosecutor. I am worried about the proliferation of summary disposals that do not have the advantage of a court or judicial input. It is far too easy for a police officer or even a prosecutor to take an injudicious decision for the benefit of his or her records, rather than in the interests of justice. I am not saying that all such disposals are wrong—we all live in the world of fixed penalty tickets for parking and traffic offences—but I am worried that they are increasingly being used as an alternative to a proper judicial process. The same applies to processes that pre-empt the actual commission of an offence—the various forms of civil injunction to reduce criminal offending. I do not wish to sound too pompous, but the more we go down that road, the more we erode the principles of British justice. If such measures are effective, we need to consider them in terms of reducing crime, but we should be aware that we are putting the cart before the horse, or the sentence before the commission of an offence, which is a dubious approach.

[David Taylor in the Chair]

My last point is about the importance of diversionary availability, to which the hon. Gentleman referred. I am not convinced that Colchester would welcome a lot of civil offenders or that cadet forces are the best place for people who have no interest in the armed forces, but simply need to be kept off the streets—putting a gun in their hands may not be the best way of teaching them to be better citizens. However, I accept that we should do a lot more in relation to youth provision, of which the cadet forces are an important part, and that we should provide alternative structures and diversions for young people so that they are interested in and engaged by something and are active. They need excellent role models to learn from and, to that extent, the hon. Gentleman is right.

We have a sentencing and a criminal justice system to protect the public and to reduce crime and re-offending. That is what our sentencing procedures should be about; not simply sounding tough, but being effective.

As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) did, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) did in an intervention, I congratulate the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) on initiating the debate. Like the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, I want to recognise publicly the contribution that the hon. Gentleman has made to our debates on criminal justice. He brings huge experience to debates, both as a solicitor advocate in the courts in Staffordshire and more widely. What he says on this subject is always worth listening to, as it is on other matters. I hope that I do not embarrass him by saying so, but it is appropriate that, from time to time, those who have a particular knowledge about a subject have the opportunity to speak.

I am grateful to the hon. and learned Gentleman, but, to spare my blushes, when I praised judges I did so in the full knowledge that he himself is a part-time judge.

The hon. Gentleman has reached the next part of my virtual notes. I was about to declare an interest. I am a Crown court recorder and have had some good and bad experiences of the problems that our criminal justice system currently has in relation to sentences.

I spent last week sitting as a recorder in a court in London. Every time that I do that, I face the same problem—our prisons and community punishment system are overcrowded. We can see an overcrowded prison, but an overcrowded community punishment system is not so obvious. According to Government statistics, about 60 per cent. of our prisons are officially overcrowded. It is no longer controversial to say that our prisons are overcrowded. Last Friday, we reached a disgusting state of affairs in which nearly 82,000 people were being held in custody. Even the Operation Safeguard system had hit the ceiling. Some 400 people were in police or court cells as a consequence of the Government’s mismanagement of the present system, which prevented those who were sentenced or on remand from being housed in proper prisons.

That has a consequence. Unlike prison cells, police and court cells do not have the facilities to evaluate medically the people who are sent there. The point made by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome about the mentally ill and those who are affected by substance abuse is writ large when such people have to be detained overnight, or for several nights, in police cells. It is bad enough in a place such as Pentonville in which the medical staff are working their backs off just to stabilise the drug addicts in their care. They cannot hope to get them off drugs or make them better. All they can do is to stabilise them with a methadone scrip or some other form of medication to ensure that they do not die during the course of their custody.

I thought that the hon. Member for Stafford would mention the current state of affairs in relation to the ability of sentencers in Staffordshire to give the appropriate sentence. As I understand it, and the hon. Gentleman will correct me if I am wrong, magistrates in Stafford, and Staffordshire more widely, find it increasingly difficult to sentence offenders to community punishments because such courses are no longer available. Therefore, for those people for whom custody is not appropriate, the resources are no longer in place to sentence them, under the Criminal Justice Act 2003, to one of the community sentence options, such as unpaid work, or alcohol or drug rehabilitation—I think that there are 12 such options. I know, Mr. Taylor, that as a magistrate you will have some familiarity with that as well. As a consequence, magistrates in Stafford and Staffordshire now have to send inappropriate people into custody as opposed to dealing with them in the community. That adds to the terrible problem of overcrowding that the Government have created.

Mr. Taylor, if I have not finished by 12.15, will someone please shut me up?

I shall certainly do that.

I want the Minister, who has been waiting patiently, to have an opportunity to respond to the points that have been made. In particular, I would like her to respond to the points made by the hon. Gentleman, even if she does not have time to respond to those made by the Opposition.

Since 1997, the criminal justice system has been going through a period of revolution. Unfortunately, we have seen more movement than productivity. That is beginning to manifest itself in the overcrowded prison estate and in the inability of justices of the peace to sentence appropriately. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome said at the end of his remarks, sentencers’ discretion is being undermined on a daily basis. I am not suggesting that there is a malign motive. I do not believe that the Minister and her colleagues get up in the morning and say, “How can I further erode the judicial and sentencers’ discretion?” However, that erosion is the unintended consequence of the mismanagement of our criminal justice system.

The prison and probation services have been victims of the Government’s failed experiment in public sector reform through targets and central control. The Government confidently believed that central Government could hold unwieldy Departments to account using top-down targets. Civil servants would be rendered super-efficient, almost stakhanovite, with the aid of efficient modern IT systems. However, their confidence was misplaced. Officials have been burdened with too many targets. Monitoring has forced them to meet intermediate targets, leading to ineffective, demoralising box-ticking instead of productive and fulfilling work. The IT systems that are supposed to make the whole system function have invariably been late and over budget.

The Government rightly realised that the split between prison and probation is the root cause of failure, but their attempts to fix it have foundered. The first attempt was the National Offender Management Service, which was envisaged by Lord Carter as a new bureaucracy that would co-ordinate the prison and probation services. NOMS assigned a case officer—an offender manager—to follow the progress of each criminal from the time that they were sentenced until they were reintegrated into society. The officer was to use a state-of-the-art computer system, C-NOMIS. However, instead of drawing together prisons and probation, as Carter wanted, the Government created an inflated bureaucratic monster that sat above the Prison Service and probation service, did little to facilitate co-ordination, and sucked more than £1.5 billion a year—more than the budget of the national probation service—from the resources available for offender management. The computer system, C-NOMIS, was late and over budget, and the Ministry of Justice has now announced that a system that it previously described as

“central to end-to-end offender management”

will not be rolled out to the probation service. As for NOMS, the Government have decided to merge the top management of the Prison Service, probation service and NOMS, effectively subsuming a slimmed-down NOMS into the Prison Service, but without integrating the delivery of the services on the ground.

Meanwhile, Ministers have continually interfered in the running of prisons. The former director general of the Prison Service and chief executive of NOMS, Martin Narey, said on Radio 4’s “Analysis” programme on 20 July 2006:

“The Prison Service for some years has been an executive agency in name only. The autonomy, the ability of its director general to get on and manage the organisation has been significantly eroded... I was spending 70 per cent. of my time in my last year at the Home Office managing ministers. For prison and probation services alike, targets have been focused on measurable levels and on throughputs, but not on success at tackling reoffending.”

That, as a recent National Audit Office report has found, creates perverse incentives and outcomes, stifles innovation, and ultimately restricts the ability of the Ministry of Justice to deliver on its own service level agreement to reduce reoffending.

The Government’s approach suffers from two fundamental flaws: the chasm between prison and probation, which they have failed to bridge, and the lack of incentives for people within the system, which they have not attempted to address. In essence, reoffending has not been reduced because it has been nobody’s job to reduce it. That is why we have the problems that the hon. Members for Stafford and for Somerton and Frome mentioned in relation to the collapse of the sentencing system.

Time does not allow me to analyse what is going wrong with our prisons. Let me deal with the subject of community punishments, which is creaking in Stafford and Staffordshire, and, increasingly, elsewhere in the country. Magistrates deal with about 90 to 95 per cent. of all criminal cases. Although the Crown court deals with more serious offences, it deals with a smaller proportion of the offences brought to justice. It has often been said that the answer to the state of our prisons is to give up and to advocate the use of community punishments. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome highlighted the implied policy of the Secretary of State for Justice that, because of the prison overcrowding, the only thing that can be done is to send inappropriate people on community punishments. I do not think that he has gone that far, but he might yet. That would be as wrong as over-filling the prisons in the first place.

We reached a ludicrous stage last Thursday, when the Prison Service and the probation service met for a private conference in Leeds, at which the director general of the Prison Service, Mr. Wheatley, was having to advise prison governors during the tea break to go back to their telephones and ring their prisons to ensure that the overcrowded prison estate was emptied into the less crowded open prison estate. “If necessary, use your own transport,” he is alleged to have said. The Government have organised a grossly irresponsible set of affairs whereby the director general of the Prison Service is, as a consequence of prison overcrowding, requiring unsuitable people to be decanted out of the secure estate into the open estate.

I am no spokesman for the Prison Officers Association, but I am not surprised that on 18 February it issued a press release that stated:

“POA members were bussing prisoners from establishment to establishment to try and accommodate almost 82,000 prisoners over the weekend. This policy will lead to unrest amongst prisoners and prisoners being placed in unsuitable accommodation and thus endangering the general public. We are aware that the Ministry of Justice have instructed all Governors to send prisoners to open prisons. It is believed that all open prisons will be operating at around 95 per cent. capacity. To the POA that can only mean one thing; open prisons will be dangerous places to work in and the public in surrounding areas will be at risk...The problems of overcrowding are not new; and the problems we face today are as a direct result of the lack of real investment for new prisons over the last 10 years. If things continue as they are we will see more and more unsuitable and dangerous prisoners released early and public safety will be at risk.”

Believe that or not, it is a fact that unsuitable people are now being pushed through to the open prison estate and, as a consequence, are not receiving the proper rehabilitation that they should have received within the closed estate if the sentencing planning system was operating in a correct manner. Just as the resources appear to have been mismanaged in the secure estate, so the resources are now being managed in a detrimental fashion in the community punishment system, particularly in Staffordshire.

The Secretary of State for Justice was invited to address the Howard League for Penal Reform and in a speech to it on 21 November 2007, which I attended, he said:

“For people sentenced to under twelve months in prison, reoffending rates have long been too high, and this is the case regardless of exactly how long those prisoners are inside. Community sentences will, in many cases, be a better alternative.”

However, robust alternatives to custody have so far evaded the Government. As the National Audit Office observed in a report published in January,

“for unpaid work to be seen to be punishing and implemented properly, it needs to be demanding”.

However, probation inspectors found that only 63 per cent. of unpaid work requirements were suitably demanding. The Ministry of Justice concedes that, although the maximum amount of work under such requirements can be up to 300 hours, the average is only 100.

There is a place for community sentences to deal with offenders whose crimes do not warrant imprisonment and where treatment in the community offers a better prospect of rehabilitation than imprisonment. Such punishments can be useful in so far as they allow offenders to remain close to home, family and work, while affording opportunities to receive vital rehabilitation and skills. However, they cannot simply be used as an act of faith, and should not be used simply because the jails are full. The way to use community punishments to reduce the prison population is to make community punishment work to reduce reoffending, and so reduce the supply of criminals who will be sent to prison in the future.

In the past decade, the Government have embraced community sentences as a way to divert criminals away from the ever more overcrowded prison estate. Five years ago, the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), talked about tough community sentences to

“reduce the prison population at the lower end”.

Disturbingly, community sentences are now given to more than 40 per cent. of violent offenders, and in the past three years nearly 90 rapists have received community sentences. In addition, a fair few of the 12,000 or 13,000 people who have been released early from custody on licence—I am referring to the end of custody licence scheme—since 29 June 2007 have been violent offenders, despite the fact that the Government’s rules for the release of people on ECL are supposed to keep violent offenders off ECL. The Secretary of State says, “Oh, don’t worry about the 18 days,” but it is in the last 18 days that short-sentence prisoners receive the necessary contacts with the health service, jobs and so on—

Order. I call the Minister to respond to the debate.

Thank you, Mr. Taylor. No doubt the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) now regrets suggesting that he be stopped, because he was stopped in full flow, but I am sure that he will have a chance to finish his sentence on another occasion.

I begin, as all hon. Members have done, by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) on both securing this debate on an important topic, which has provoked a great deal of interest among Front Benchers, and the way in which he has advanced his theses and made his remarks. His speech was excellent and well worth listening to, and I know that it was appreciated on both sides of the Chamber. Some of us perhaps come at the issue from a slightly different perspective, but there is a lot of common ground across the Chamber in respect of much of what he has said.

I echo what my hon. Friend has said about the people who work throughout the criminal justice system, who are not thanked as often as they ought to be by society—I always do my best to thank them personally—for their work in tackling tough problems and issues and dealing with people with many difficulties and problems who are not the most sympathetic members of our society. They all do an excellent job. My hon. Friend has mentioned most of them, but, like him, I am happy to thank everybody involved, even though they may not have been mentioned by either him or me. Clearly, what they do is sometimes a thankless task, but it is vital in our society, and we all appreciate it. I want to make that absolutely clear.

As my hon. Friend has also said—other hon. Members have echoed this—custody will always have to be available for serious and dangerous offenders, but a key part of the reform of sentencing policy over the past few years has been to try to limit the use of short custodial sentences for less serious offenders by unlocking the potential of the community order and increasing its flexibility, making it more possible for sentencers, be they magistrates or judges, to deal appropriately with individual cases, as has been emphasised. It is entirely appropriate that they take the decisions in individual cases; it is not for Parliament or Ministers to impose solutions to individual cases in our courts system.

Within a framework of reserving prison for serious and violent offenders, we are doing our utmost to enable the system to reduce reoffending, to protect the public and to give those who have offended a chance to tackle the problems that have perhaps led to their offending behaviour and ensure that they come out as more useful members of society than they were when they entered the criminal justice system. That balance is correct, and I have not heard any hon. Member in this debate or in other debates on the subject suggest that it is wrong. Prison should be used for serious and dangerous offenders in order to protect the public, and we should use other approaches to deal with those who would not benefit from custody or who do not have to be in custody for the public to be protected.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 provided an adult sentencing framework that was clearer and more flexible than that which previously pertained. The legislation set out for the first time in statute the purposes of sentencing for adults, which all hon. Members have referred to, namely, punishment, crime reduction, reform and rehabilitation, public protection and reparation. Sentences were reformed in that legislation, but perhaps most significantly the various types of community order for adults were replaced with a single community order with a range of possible requirements, and new sentences for serious and violent offenders were introduced to ensure that they are kept in prison or under supervision for longer than previously to try to manage the risks that they present. The intention is for the court to provide each offender with a sentence that best meets the needs of the case, at any level of seriousness, for sentences to be more effectively managed by the correctional services and for correctional services and the courts to work closely together on delivering the new sentences.

Tough community sentences include a wide range of requirements, as they should, including unpaid work, drug treatment and curfews—some of those things were mentioned in the debate. They allow offenders to maintain employment, education and family links and ensure that offenders do not get sucked into a cycle of repeat offending that they are less likely to get out of as time goes on. Instead, the sentences deliver interventions to address offending behaviour.

The Government are convinced that a well planned and properly supervised community sentence can be tough on the offender and far more valuable than prison in offering the individual opportunities to change their behaviour and constructive possibilities for the future. The overall reoffending rate for community sentences, 51 per cent., is lower than that for short prison sentences—the overall reoffending rate after a short custodial sentence is more than 70 per cent. Even on the basis of those bare figures, such approaches are more effective.

We have made substantial progress on both the enforcement and quality of community sentences—my hon. Friend has referred to that—and 90 per cent. of breaches are now dealt with. There is no reason why the public and sentencers cannot have confidence that community sentences are tough alternatives to short custodial sentences. Increasing community confidence in the effectiveness of such arrangements is the aim of ensuring rigorous enforcement.

I agreed with my hon. Friend when he talked about ensuring that the general public understands how tough community sentences can be and how useful they are. There is a general perception or feeling at the moment, as any Member of Parliament will know, that people who receive community sentences have had some kind of let-off. Of course, they have not—community sentences can be much tougher than short custodial sentences, and they can make an offender face up to the problems that they have caused and deal with the issues that led them into offending more intensively than if they simply went into custody. As my hon. Friend has said, restorative justice is now embedded in the youth justice system, which is perhaps not that well known among the general public. Victim contact or reparation can be a part of youth disposals.

My hon. Friend has raised the issue of conditional cautions and made a point about a written answer. The answer should have stated that the non-compliance rate, rather than the compliance rate, was 6 per cent. There was a misspelling in the answer, but we were attempting to make the point that conditional cautions are almost always complied with. They are successful, and the conditions can have an impact. Often, they make a real difference to whether an individual becomes involved in offending behaviour again. Obviously, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, which the House of Lords is debating, extends the capacity to use conditional cautions on 16 and 17-year-olds.

I agree with everyone who contributed to the debate, including the hon. and learned Member for Harborough, that diverting young people away from the criminal justice system in the first place is the way to control the increase in the prison population in the medium and longer term. Diverting people away from the criminal justice system must be the best thing for society, and conditional cautions appear to have the potential to do so. They have restorative and reparative features, and they can involve victims. Offenders might be required to write letters of apology to victims, or to deal with or put right the damage done by their graffiti or criminal damage, for example.

Those are visible ways in which to say to a community that the person who committed such offences has been caught, that they are putting things right, that they have had to apologise, and that they have agreed to those things. Quite often, such people are required to pay compensation. That is an effective way in which to deal with the kind of low-level antisocial behaviour that is so corrosive in our communities, as many MPs know. Calling such things “antisocial behaviour” may make them seem minor, and the offences might be at the petty end of the scale, but they can be a real problem in vulnerable communities, and they need to be rigorously tackled. That is why there is a sense in many of our communities that custody is the right answer—people want such behaviour to stop. Conditional cautioning provides an alternative way to make that point clearly in our communities.

My hon. Friend has referred to problem-solving courts, which have the potential to deal with those issues positively. People involved in the community court pilot in north Liverpool, which I know particularly well, make a great effort and provide great quality work. The district judge in the court, David Fletcher, does a superb job with the people who come before him every two weeks, if they have not met the conditions by going through drug rehabilitation or looking for a job. He knows that if those people have not done what he asks them to do, they cannot hide behind the fact that they will next appear before a different judge.

It is obvious that the drugs court in Liverpool is a success, as is its equivalent in west London, but why are there only two? Surely there ought to be more.

There are two drugs courts pilots at present. The Government like evidence-based policy making, so we should ensure that the pilots work and that they make a difference. The court in north Liverpool is a community court—it does not deal only with drug-related matters, although drug rehabilitation is often part of what the district judge orders for persistent offenders who appear before him repeatedly. He seeks to supervise such people in the community and to avoid sending them into custody, if he can.

There are 13 community court pilots. Early evaluations show that they have the potential to reduce reoffending over time. It is too soon for us to be clear on that, because the pilots have not been going long enough for us to be sure of the long-term impact on reoffending behaviour among persistent offenders. However, we are extending the approach—there are now 13 community courts—and we intend to ensure that magistrates courts in other areas adopt some of the lessons, so that we can show in due course that they have a persistent impact on the types of offence that I have mentioned.

We intend to ensure that we have the money to extend the process to other courts areas, but before we become too enthusiastic and roll the pilots out further, we must be clear that the pilots work properly and that, when we evaluate the evidence, we see that they work. We need to be able to show that the problem-solving approach works, whether in community, domestic violence or drug courts.

My hon. Friend has referred to the problem-solving approach. We may argue how well offender management works, whether it is well resourced and what the problems are, but the idea behind it is to wrap interventions around the needs of the individual, particularly persistent and young offenders, to solve their problems so that they do not commit further crime. I believe that that is the way forward.

My hon. Friend has referred to interventions below court level and to intensive supervision. I agreed with what he said about the importance of the first three years after birth and parenting. The Government, with the Youth Justice Board, are developing some intensive supervision and surveillance programmes to deal with those who fall into bad behaviour partly because of their upbringing and bad experiences as young people. That approach involves family and parenting support over a six-month period, with the intention of ensuring that, at the end of the period, young people can go back to their families secure in the knowledge that their families are more able to cope with them, and that the young people concerned have changed their behaviour. That has a great deal of potential.

My hon. Friend may know that we are piloting intensive fostering in his area, which is another way in which to take hold of people who have gone wrong, perhaps because of poor experiences and parenting in their early years, and to ensure that they can be returned to society when they are less likely to offend in future.

A lot of work is being done in our criminal justice system to tackle the issues raised by my hon. Friend and others who spoke in the debate. We need to continue to put effort, money and time into the approaches that I have discussed. I congratulate my hon. Friend on the way in which he put his ideas forward, and he raised one or two issues that I shall have to go away and think about.