THE need to prove a suspect’s guilt “beyond reasonable doubt” should be relaxed in serious criminal cases to make it easier to convict organised crime bosses and people traffickers, Tony Blair said yesterday. But petty offenders may be kept out of court altogether under plans to reform the justice system.

Mr Blair, announcing the formation of a new FBI-style police force called the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), said he was worried that drug and people-trafficking gangs escaped prosecution because it was often impossible to establish guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Mr Blair said: “I think people would accept that, within certain categories of case, provided it’s big enough, you don’t take the normal burden.”

His comments came on the same day that the new Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, QC, announced plans to save court time and money by giving petty offenders a “conditional” caution which would be linked to a promise to make reparations to the local community.

Mr Blair’s ideas for reform, which would also allow telephone taps to be used as evidence in court, met with resistance from senior lawyers and civil liberty groups.

Barry Hugill, a spokesman for Liberty, said: “The argument is always based upon the public’s fear of organised crime.

“We all want to see serious criminals put away but this is justice lite. I am not at all sure people would accept the change. The need to prove a case conclusively has served us well over time.

“How long before it (the change in the burden of proof) became a general rule. It would be absolutely wrong if you start to convict people on the basis of ‘you have to believe us when we we say this person is a serious criminal. We can’t prove it but you can trust us’. That is the essence of the argument.”

Ministers hope the new agency and extra powers will have the same success in Britain in combating organised crime as the FBI and US Department of Justice achieved in destroying the Mafia gangs in New York. There, detectives targeted criminal assets and used telephone taps to break the godfathers.

In Britain gangs, including one powerful London clan which dominates drug dealing and protection rackets, have evaded successful prosecution for more than 20 years. Merseyside and Greater Manchester police have also struggled against the kingpins of drug trafficking.

Ministers fear that the new gangs growing up in the ethnic communities will add to the power of the underworld.

Mr Blair said the new police agency must be prepared to be “ruthless” in breaking networks established by international crime bosses.

The agency, expected to be operating by 2006, will have 5,000 staff investigating drug trafficking, people smuggling, and money laundering. However, it needed more powers to target organised criminals, and changes to the law to make conviction easier. “My impression is that the system is struggling against the presumption that you treat these crimes like every other type of crime and you build up cases beyond reasonable doubt. I think we have got to look at this,” Mr Blair said.

Mr Blair envisages a lowering of the centuries-old standard of reasonable doubt in criminal cases to that adopted in civil courts of “on the balance of probabilities”. Such a change would need new legislation to be passed.

Mr Macdonald is already known to oppose David Blunkett’s recently announced plans for lowering the burden of proof in terrorist cases. “Presently and historically one of the guarantors of safe convictions has been the criminal standard of proof,” he said.

A spokesman for the Bar Council insisted that there should be no change. “If you are going to convict someone of a terrible crime you need to be certain beyond reasonable doubt that they have done it, rather than the citizen is probably guilty of doing something.” “Lowering the burden of proof does not get rid of organised crime. You do it by good intelligence and good policing,” he said.

Earlier yesterday Mr Macdonald outlined his own instant justice reforms for petty offenders.

Prosecutors could give petty offenders a conditional caution linked to a promise to make a reparation to the local community.

Offenders could be ordered to pay for their crimes, or clean up the mess or damage they have caused, under the move which will give the Crown Prosecution Service a new proactive role in dealing with criminals.

The new cautioning power will be piloted in a number of areas of England and Wales this autumn and would mean that a large amount of lowlevel criminal behaviour would never be dealt with by the courts.

Mr Macdonald insisted that it would not apply to persistent offenders.

He said that if an offender smashed a window, he could be ordered to pay for the cost of replacing it. A person cautioned for graffiti could be made to clean it up or pay for the cost of removing it from a building or wall. An offender could refuse a caution, which carries an admission of guilt, but would then be prosecuted. The caution would go on a person’s criminal record.

TIPPING THE BALANCE

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Family cuts its waste to one binful a year
• Cameron can learn from Thatcher in 1979
• VAT is back ... and it's confusing