HC Deb 13 July 1977 vol 935 cc437-48

'For the Table in paragraph 1 of Schedule 3 to the Magistrates' Courts Act 1952 (maximum periods of imprisonment in default of payment of fines etc.) there shall be substituted the following Table:—

"TABLE
An amount not exceeding £25… 7 days
An amount exceeding £25 but not exceeding £50…… 14 days
An amount exceeding £50 but not exceeding £200…… 30 days
An amount exceeding £200 but not exceeding £500…… 60 days
An amount exceeding £500 but not exceeding £1,000… 90 days
An amount exceeding £1,000 but not exceeding£2,500 6 months
An amount exceeding £2,500 but not exceeding£5,000 9 months
An amount exceeding £5,000 12 months.".'
—[Mr. John.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Brynmor John)

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Speaker

With this it may be convenient to discuss the following:

New Clause 2—Power to order search of persons before Crown Court.

New Clause 9—Refusal or neglect to pay fine.

Amendment No. 85, in page 20, line 8, Clause 27, leave out subsection (3).

Amendment No. 90, in page 28, line 13, Clause 36, at end insert

'except that no term of imprisonment shall he imposed under this subsection for nonpayment of a fine or for want of sufficient distress to satisfy a fine'.

We are also to take Government Amendments Nos. 95 to 99 and Nos. 111, 144, 159, 167, 168, 170, 174, 176, 192, 193.

Mr. John

I should explain that in this formidable grouping the effective new clauses are Nos. 1 and 2 and that the effective Government amendment is No. 159.

The basic aim is threefold. First, I deal with New Clause 2, which is rather separate although it has been grouped with the other new clauses and amendments. The clause would slightly improve the enforcement of sums of money ordered to be paid at the Crown court and would offer, therefore, some small relief to magistrates' courts, which have the responsibility of enforcing Crown court orders

At present, when there is a fine or forfeited recognizance the magistrates' court has the power to search the person there present to see whether he has the sum that will enable him to pay such a fine or forfeited recognizance. At present the Crown court does not have such power. Even if the person comes before the Crown court, the matter has to be remitted downwards, with the consequent administrative problems caused there

The clause would give the Crown court this additional power. It is only a small power, but it will in certain circumstances provide a certain minor relief to the magistrates' cour

New Clause I follows a promise that I made in Committee. I said in Committee that we would bring forward an amendment to adjust the scale of maximum periods of imprisonment to be served in default of fines. With this must be linked Amendment No. 159, which follows closely the debate in Committee when my hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Mr. Kilroy-Silk) played a considerable part. It concerned the problem of imprisoning fine defaulters and the consequent additional pressure on the prison servi

As I said on 30th June 1976, the number of fine defaulters was 4.1 per cent. of the total prison population. The chief concern of the members of the Committee—it was not a party issue on that occasion—was that certain people who could not afford to pay were finding themselves imprisoned. That was happening because of their lack of means. Amendment No. 159, together with New Clause I, seeks to reinforce a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypool (Mr. Abse) on Second Reading and to underline the importance of Section 44 of the Criminal Justice Act 1967, which consists of a means examinati

If the House accepts Amendment No. 159, henceforth a person will be subject to imprisonment only if he fails to pay the fine because of his wilful refusal or culpable neglect. No one will henceforth find himself imprisoned for having failed to pay a fine if he lacks the means to do

Secondly, I undertook to amend substantially the relationship of the period of imprisonment in default of payment. I undertook to bring it into line with modern day concepts. The House will see what is now proposed. It is useful to compare the proposed table with the table that now obtains. That table provides for a sentence not exceeding seven days for a fine not exceeding£2. It provides for 14 days for a fine between£2 and£5, 30 days for between£5 and£20 and 60 days for between£20 and£50. Ninety days may be given for a fine of more than£50.

Mr. Robert Kilroy-Silk (Ormskirk)

I refer to Government Amendment No. 159, which in sub-paragraph (i) states: if the court is satisfied that the default is due to the offender's wilful refusal or culpable neglect". As my hon. Friend will realise, that goes to the heart of New Clause 9. I ask for slightly more clarification and perhaps for an assurance. Do I take it that Amendment No. 159 would mean that all those coming before the courts who had previously been convicted and had had the penalty of a fine imposed upon them would go to prison only for refusal to pay and that no other categories are caught by the amendment?

Mr. John

I shall deal with that matter shortly. I was intending to deal with my hon. Friend's new clause separately.

I return to the scales of imprisonment for non-payment of fines. The House will see that New Clause I would provide a maximum of seven days' imprisonment to be imposed for a fine not exceeding£25 whereas the present maximum is 60 days. I believe that that will have a significant effect upon the occupancy of prisons by fine defaulters. There is no doubt that our experience and the experience of European countries is that we cannot do without the sanction of imprisonment for fine defaulters, but the primary shock is the impact of imprisonment rather than the length of imprisonment. If we keep the terms as long as they now stand, there is a considerable argument for saying that we are punishing ourselves rather than the fine defaulter. I believe that New Clause I accords with the more modern outlook now taken.

4.0 p.m.

The new clauses and amendments go a substantial way towards meeting the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk without some of the objections that I had and still have to his mode of dealing with the matter. My hon. Friend would have a separate offence. That would involve a decision whether the fine had been paid, a separate summons, with consequent dislocation of the police service in serving that new summons, a fresh court hearing, and so on. Where a person has failed to pay a fine—my hon. Friend said "refused" to pay a fine, but there is a difference between failure and refusal to pay a fine—he will be imprisoned only if the court is satisfied that non-payment of the fine is due to his wilful refusal or culpable neglect. It is more than mere penury or indigence. I believe that that will meet the point that my hon. Friend has in mind.

I commend to the House the new clauses and the consequential amendments and I invite my hon. Friend not to press New Clause 9. I believe that he has got a substantial amount of what he wanted from the Government's amendments.

Mr. Walter Clegg (North Fylde)

I welcome New Clause 2—Power to order search of persons before Crown Court. I believe that it will save a great deal of public expense and police and other time.

I agree with the Minister of State that it is essential to retain the deterrent of imprisonment to enforce the payment of fines. Anyone with practical experience of the courts knows that, without that deterrent, there would be an even longer list of unpaid fines than there is now. I do not object to Amendment No. 159. It almost follows the present practice of the courts.

Mr. Kilroy-Sink

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister of State for having tabled these new clauses and amendments. I believe that they go some way towards meeting the objections that were voiced on both sides of the Committee and were also encapsulated in my New Clause 9.

I think that my hon. Friend will agree that the number of fine defaulters in our prisons at any one time is disturbingly high. That is what the Wootton Committee said as long ago as 1970. Therefore, efforts should be made at all times to prevent large numbers of people—particularly inadequate offenders—from being imprisoned because they have not the means or the wherewithal to pay their fines.

The intention behind my new clause all along was to ensure no more than that those who were unable to meet or were incapable of meeting the financial penalties imposed upon them by the courts should not subsequently find themselves in prison. I am referring specifically to vagrants, drunks and alcoholics. I hope that the Minister of State will confirm that, given their limited means, it is unlikely that such persons will end up in Prison Department establishments in future.

In the light of what my hon. Friend said, it is my intention not to move my new clause. But taken with that new clause is Amendment No. 90. That attempts to exclude the possibility of imprisoning a parent for the non-payment of a fine originally imposed upon a child or young person.

Under the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, the courts lost the power to impose sanctions for the non-payment of fines until the offender reached the age of 17. This Bill proposes that, when a fine imposed on a juvenile is not paid, the magistrates' courts should be empowered to make an attendance centre order, to bind over the defaulter's parent or legal guardian or—this is the matter to which I specifically object—to transfer the fine originally imposed upon the juvenile offender to the parent or legal guardian. On the face of it, that may not seem unreasonable. In fact, that course of action has been advocated by many hon. Members on both sides of the House and, indeed, by numerous individuals and organisations outside.

The principal argument in favour of what the Government are proposing in the Bill is that at present magistrates are sometimes deterred from imposing fines on juveniles by the knowledge that they cannot be enforced and that increased powers of enforcement might lead to greater use of the fine which, if used sensibly, is a useful and widely appropriate non-custodial sentence.

It could also be argued that the power to transfer fines to parents might encourage them to take more responsibility for their children's actions. As a parent, I am in favour of parents taking more responsibility for the actions of their children. One problem in modern society is that too few parents take too little responsibility for too many children. There is not sufficient discipline and surveillance of their actions and perhaps not sufficient inculcation of social responsibility and a proper moral code.

On the other hand, magistrates often stress that if a fine has any value—I think that this point will be accepted by hon. Members on both sides of the House—it lies in the young person who has been convicted of an offence and has been fined paying it himself without the possibility of evading or of passing the responsibility for meeting that fine to any other person. Yet that is what, in effect, is being proposed in the Bill.

The whole point is that the fine—the sanction—should relate directly and specifically to the individual concerned. If the imposition of a fine is to have any educative and punitive effect by bringing home to the offender the enormity of his actions, he must in practice be directly responsible for meeting it.

The Kilbrandon Report on Children and Young Persons in Scotland rejected the idea that is now enshrined in the Bill of transferring fines to parents. Kilbrandon rejected the suggestion that it would help—I suspect that this is a subsidiary motive behind the intention—to educate parents about their social responsibilities to their children. In a section headed Parental responsibility and how it can be furthered", the Report stated that the practice of fining parents for their children's misdemeanours seems to be open to serious objection…The educational value, in relation to the parents, must in the circumstances be highly doubtful; and the argument that the process will indirectly be of educational value to the child we consider to be untenable. It is a fact—I recall the Minister of State acknowledging it in Committee—that many of the most recalcitrant of our young delinquents are at odds with their parents. They are not in any practical sense, although they may be legally and theoretically, under the responsibility and guidance of their parents. Such a juvenile often suffers a distant and strained relationship, which can only be exacerbated if, having been convicted of an offence and had a fine imposed upon him, for one reason or another he does not pay the fine and it is transferred to and made the responsibility of the parents—parents who have no real control over and perhaps, though it may be difficult to understand by normal values, no real love for that child. Therefore, the transfer of responsibility for a fine can only make matters between a juvenile and his parents more difficult than they are and put an extra strain on what may already be extremely distressing social circumstances.

Such a course as is proposed would drive an even greater wedge between members of a family. The whole point of the provision should be to bind the family together with a sense of responsibility for the actions of each of its members, particularly the younger members. However, we appear to be about to drive a great wedge between members of a family, which I believe to be counterproductive to family unity.

It has one other potentially—I put it no higher than that—hazardous and damaging consequence. That is that if the juvenile who has been fined does not pay the fine, it is placed upon the shoulders of the parents or legal guardian. If the legal guardian does not care or has no time for the juvenile, or if he is fed up with the misdemeanours and misdeeds of the juvenile, is not prepared in any circumstances to be seen to accept responsibility for the juvenile's actions and is not prepared to fork out his hard-earned money to pay the fine, he will be guilty of the offence referred to in New Clause 1 and Amendment No. 159. He will be guilty of wilfully refusing to pay the fine and of culpable neglect in failing to pay it.

Those circumstances give rise to the potentially hazardous situation in which parents can be imprisoned, by a very indirect, tenuous and,I suspeet,unintended route, for the consequences of the actions of children for whom perhaps they ought to have responsibility, for whom, in legal terms, they may be reponsible, but over whom in practice they have no control.

For that reason I ask my hon. Friend to think again about this question. I know that he considered it in Committee and since then, but I still feel, in spite of his comments then and his arguments in defence of the Government's position, that this is an untenable situation which cannot lead to the kind of beneficial consequences which he and I want, and which, in the long run, will lead to far more extreme difficulties than those that he is trying to eradicate.

Mr. Nicholas Fairbairn (Kinross and West Perthshire)

There is a tendency for reforms in this country to be imitated across the border. I greatly appreciate the intention of the new clauses, and I think that they are very sensible. They are a chronic indictment of the Government's economic policy in that they contain an element of deflation in these times.

I appreciate the Minister's concept that imprisonment or the fear of it is the deterrent and that the period, however long, deters. But that concept is contradicted by the fact that the provision follows a scale. I seriously think that it goes too far to say that failure to pay a fine of up to£25 or£50 should be punishable only by seven days or 14 days imprisonment respectively because there are many people—the hon. Member for Ormskirk (Mr. Kilroy-Silk) referred to categories of vagrants, drunks and alcoholics—for whom a week in prison is just a holiday away from lying under a bridge along the Thames.

Seven days' imprisonment is a pointless term, and I think that the minimum term ought to be 30 days. I know that the matter cannot be changed at this stage, but to provide for imprisonment periods of a week and a fortnight, which are periods of the kind in which human beings think in terms of their holidays, is absurd when one can save£50 by taking a short prison term.

Mr. John Farr (Harborough)

I wish to refer briefly to Amendments Nos. 95 to 99. In these amendments is the Minister taking into consideration, in altering certain maximum fines which may be imposed on summary conviction, only the change in the value of money? As Clause 57 states, that will be the main or possibly the only reason in many cases which would justify a more or less automatic change in the value of the fine on summary conviction as the value of money presumably depreciates.

If the House is to adopt this proposal—and that seems a fairly sensible thing to do—is there not also a case, before putting in an automatic alteration of this nature, to take into account how the maxima laid down in this and other legislation are applied by the magistrates' courts?

4.15 p.m.

There is currently a tremendous variation in this area. For some groups of offences the magistrates' courts are imposing almost the maxima at present laid down by Parliament. For other offences, notably under the Firearms Act 1968, some of which are very serious offences, on summary prosecutions the magistrates' courts regularly impose penalties on average of between 7 per cent. and 9 per cent. of the maxima laid down by Parliament. So while I am not quarrelling with the suggestion, which in these days of roaring inflation is an eminently sensible one, I believe that the maximum penalties should be automatically reviewed in this way. Surely now and again some other factor should be fed into the equation. We should consider how the magistrates' courts are dealing with particular offences in interpreting the wishes of Parliament. Some assessment should be made of that matter.

Mr. John

Three basic points have been made. The first was made by the hon. and learned Member for Kinross and West Perthshire (Mr. Fairbairn). If he believes that seven days' imprisonment for non-payment of a fine is a holiday from sleeping under bridges, a fortiori he must accept that 14 days would be an even better reward. Even on his argument there is the dilemma that if people prefer to go to prison than to pay a fine, that is not necessarily a penalty. But in future the effect of Amendment No. 159 will be to make sure that that is done only where there is wilful refusal or culpable neglect.

The second point was raised by the hon. Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr). There are two distinct aspects. The first, on Clause 57, is the Secretary of State's rule-making power to take account of changes in the value of money and to do only that. The aim is to avoid the sort of falling behind which occurs between criminal justice Bills and the desperate catching up that is then necessary. If other factors have to be taken into account, it is right and proper that they should be enshrined in Acts of Parliament rather than in the Secretary of State's power to make an order. Therefore, the other factors of which the hon. Member for Harborough has spoken could be incorporated in Acts about which it would not fall to the Home Secretary to make orders.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Mr. Kilroy-Silk) said that we had had debates about the issues involved in the Kilbrandon Report and various other matters. Clause 36 is not as automatic as he suggests. It transfers the juvenile's fines to the parent. This can be done only upon certain strict conditions. In particular, the court must be satisfied that it is reasonable to do it. It would not be reasonable to transfer to the alienated parent the responsibility for paying the juvenile's fine. Such transfer could be done only when there was culpable neglect on the part of the juvenile to pay the fine when he could afford to do so. In the present circumstances there must be culpable neglect or wilful refusal by the parent to pay the fine.

Many fail-safe devices operate before the aspect that my hon. Friend has described conies into effect. He is not predicating a real possibility.

Mr. Kilroy-Silk

May I intervene on an earlier point? New Clause I has a nice, neat tariff and this brings me to the point about hoildays made by the hon. and learned Member for Kinross and West Perthshire (Mr. Fairbairn). Does my hon. Friend think that it is reasonable that the taxpayer should have to pay£80 to keep someone in prison for seven days simply because of failure to pay a£25 fine? If we take another instance, of a fine of up to£200, on the Home Office figures that will cost us£320, without the cost of police and court time. Surely this is one sense in which we have not got our priorities right in terms of what is important in the context of the fine and the rather larger, blunter and more socially expensive instrument that we are using to deal with a relatively small problem.

Mr. John

On any showing, it must be a great deal more satisfactory than terms of imprisonment of seven days for fines not exceeding£2, which is the present basis. We are more than compensating for the fall in the value of money since 1957, and we have gone a great deal of the way to reduce the prison population in the fine defaulter category. Therefore, I hope that the House will find all this satisfactory.

Mr. Andrew F. Bennett (Stockport, North)

May I press my hon. Friend in terms of New Clause 2? Is there any duty imposed on the court to make sure that someone leaving the court having had money confiscated from him has sufficient money to get him home and to sustain himself until he receives more money?

Mr. John

As I understand the situation, that will be taken into account. At the moment, the question is the power to search. It is not necessarily the power to confiscate. The court must then use its judgment on the matter.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

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