What now for deprivations of liberty?
What will the effect of the postponement of the Liberty Protections Safeguards be on local authorities? Local Government Lawyer asked 50 adult social care lawyers for their views on the potential consequences.
SPOTLIGHT |
SPOTLIGHT |
Given the speed and scale with which the Government needed to create new regulations in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in future it needs to have the requisite tools in advance "to respond in a swift and proportionate manner that does not risk criminalising behaviour in ways incompatible with widely understood principles of the rule of law, and avoids any lasting damage to the criminal justice system", MPs have said.
In a report, Covid-19 and the criminal law, the Justice Committee concluded that the Government had been “justified in acting quickly in the face of an unprecedented health crisis but must learn lessons to ensure it is better prepared for the future”.
Other lessons identified in the report include:
The Justice Committee also called for a wide-ranging study to be conducted by the new pandemic preparedness agency (the UK Health Security Agency) to review the effectiveness of key elements of the justice response to the pandemic, including fixed penalty notices and the single justice procedure, to assess their appropriateness for future use. The new agency must have sufficient criminal law expertise at its disposal, the report said.
Chair of the Justice Committee Sir Robert Neill MP said: “The speed and seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated restrictions that we previously thought unimaginable. New criminal offences were introduced to enforce them and it is right that the Government acted quickly to create them. However, it is also clear that lessons need to be learnt and improvements made.
“As the Justice Committee, our focus is on the integrity of the criminal justice system and the Rule of Law. Our report sets out a number of lessons for the every Government on the development, communication and enforcement of new criminal offences.”
Neill added: “The new UK Health Security Agency should review the way in which the Government used the criminal law to protect public health during the pandemic. In particular it should examine the effectiveness of certain measures, such as Fixed Penalty Notices and the single justice procedure. We need to better understand whether their use was always appropriate and proportionate, and a model we should follow in the future.
“That the justice approach to the pandemic was not perfect in its early stages is understandable; to fail to learn valuable lessons to better prepare for the future would be much less so.”