gives courts greater discretion to issue conditional discharges for young persons pleading guilty to a first offence
creates a "single remand framework" for the use of secure remand for children and young people; transfers the cost of remand arrangements to local authorities; creates new conditions that must be met before a child or young person is remanded into custody
expands Youth Rehabilitation Orders to allow longer curfew hours, single duration extensions of six months; increases the maximum fines for breaches; and allows courts to order a period of supervision instead of custody following a breach
removes financial support for most cases involving housing, welfare, medical negligence, employment, debt and immigration
removes financial support for most private family law cases, other than in situations involving domestic abuse allegations also meeting other qualifying criteria
creates a new offence of squatting in a residential building, with a maximum punishment of 51 weeks' imprisonment, a fine not exceeding level 5 of the standard scale, or both; and amends the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to allow the police to enter and search such a building if they suspect someone to be squatting in it
brings the sentencing starting point for murders caused by hate on the grounds of disability or transgender to 30 years, to be in line with other types of hate crime
modifies the Crime Act 1997 to allow the Secretary of State to deport foreign nationals serving indeterminate prison sentences, once they have served the minimum term.
Development
The creation of a new offence for squatting was proposed by Mike Weatherley, Member of Parliament for Hove in East Sussex, who had been campaigning against squatting since being elected to Parliament in 2010. In a consultation held in 2011, the government raised the option of criminalising squatting in commercial properties. Following responses to the consultation indicating a lower level of concern over such squatting, it indicated that it had no current plans to extend the definition of the offense. At the time, polling indicated the public were largely in favour of criminalising squatting, with a YouGov poll finding eight out of ten people agreed with the change. Crispin Blunt, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice within the Ministry of Justice at the time, justified the changes to the law, saying:
Effects and criticism
Squatting
Section 144 of LASPO, creating the new offense of squatting in a residential property, came into force on 1 September 2012. A 'residential property' is defined as one "designed or adapted, before the time of entry, for use as a place to live". The first person to be imprisoned for the new offence was Alex Haight, a 21-year-old bricklayer from Plymouth who had come to London looking for work and squatted a council flat. On 27 September 2012 he was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. Rules regarding squatting commercial properties remained as layout in Section 6 of the Criminal Law Act 1977. The act was criticised by the charities Crisis and The Big Issue Foundation as criminalising the homeless, possibly causing a sharp rise in homelessness, and benefitting landlords that leave their buildings empty. Several campaign groups protested the law at locations around the UK in 2011. On 23 February 2013, Daniel Gauntlett, a homeless man, was warned by Kent police not to shelter in a boarded up empty bungalow that was due for demolition. An inquest on 27 February found that his subsequent death sleeping on its doorstep was caused by hypothermia. In March 2012, the campaign group Squatters' Action for Secure Homes published a report claiming that the cost of implementing the squatting law reforms over the next five years would reach £790m, some five times the official estimate. In August 2013 Mike Weatherley wrote to the Prime Minister in support of an extension of the law to cover commercial properties. following 24 MPs putting their signature to an Early Day Motion in January 2013 calling for the law's extension.
Legal aid
In August 2011 the Law Centres Federation and London Legal Support Trust warned that a third of the 56 law centres in the United Kingdom would be forced to close as a result of the cuts to legal aid. In May 2012 the Labour peer Lord Bach, former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Justice and current shadow spokesman on legal aid, condemned the legislation as "a rotten bill demeans our justice system and therefore our country. away from the poor their access to justice." Andy Slaughter, the shadow Justice Minister, described the legislation as "cynical" and "cover up mistakes made". The Ministry of Justice defended the legislation, stating that it would keep legal aid "where legal help is most needed, where people's life or liberty is at stake or they are at risk of serious physical harm, face immediate loss of their home or their children may be taken into care, reducing the £2.1bn per year legal aid bill for England and Wales." Transitional arrangements for the treatment of existing legal aid cases were established in 2013 by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 Regulations 2013, which also made consequential amendments to secondary legislation. In January 2014, thousands of criminal case lawyers across the country participated in a protest, by not participating in cases, against planned cuts to legal aid. The protest, organised by the Criminal Bar Association, was the first in the history of the criminal bar in the UK.
