According to ‘The Times’, half of all criminal cases in England and Wales are punished out of court. Last year up to 40,000 cases of assault were dealt with by a caution despite guidelines that say they should not normally be used for violent or sexual offences. Jack Straw told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One programme that “the guidance about cautioning is actually very clear. It says a simple caution should be used for low-level offending. Only in exceptional circumstances should it be used to deal with more serious offences…What we are going to look at is how that guidance is properly applied.” Asked if no violent offence more serious than common assault would in future be dealt with out of court, he said “that is basically the way the system is supposed to operate at the moment and we will certainly be looking very clearly at that.” The justice secretary went on to deny that the Government had encouraged the use of cautions and fixed-penalty notices to ease the pressure on overcrowded jails. He said that in most cases the offences being dealt with by the penalties would not previously have led to any police action.

The justice secretary’s concerns are shared by the DPP and by Britain’s leading policeman, as reported respectively in ‘The Times’ and the ‘Sunday Times’. Keir Starmer said that while there was a proper place for trivial offences to be dealt with outside the courts, the system had developed in an incoherent way and needed to be looked at again. “My view is there should be a structured, tiered approach which specifies what case will be dealt with at what level — and will be transparent.” Sir Paul Stephenson said that attempts to reduce pressure on courts and prisons meant that the police are expected to assume a criminal justice role. “The outcome of that has been an almost uncontrollable increase in cautions, and the introduction of the fixed penalty ticket, which in the public’s mind equates to a parking ticket”, and should not be used for “theft and thuggery”.

According to statistics published in the ‘Guardian’, a total of 2.2 million people were cautioned between 2000 and 2008, including more than 550,000 who were given repeat cautions. And as Marcel Berlins points out in the same newspaper, the police are issuing more cautions and fixed penalties “to offenders who, two or three years ago, would have had to stand trial and be legally represented”.