Call for new law as unpaid fines total over £1.4m

The Scottish Conservative Party said up to 1.4 million from unpaid fines was being lost every year because courts sent defaulters to prison rather than ensuring the penalties were paid directly from wages or benefits.

Annabel Goldie, the party’s justice spokeswoman, said the eventual cost to the public was many millions more, with the taxpayer having to fund thousands of unnecessary prison places.

She said the situation was highlighted by the imprisonment of Tommy Sheridan, the leader of the SSP, who was given a seven-day sentence on Monday after refusing to pay a fine imposed after an anti-nuclear protest.

According to Executive figures, nearly 9,000 fines were discharged by imprisonment last year, at a cost of 1.4 million.

In 2001, there were 7,216 prison admissions for non-payment of fines - costing the Scottish public some 80 per day for every inmate.

Ms Goldie said: "Prison as a sanction for non-payment of fines is a historic way of dealing with people who couldn’t pay fines, but we are now in a different situation.

"It is not sensible in the modern age for this to still be the case and we must investigate the possibility of docking people’s benefits or salaries at source as a matter of course.

"It is not good for the accused person to be sent to prison and it is not good for the country to lose out on the fine money, or to have to pay for the cost of putting someone in prison."

A spokeswoman for SACRO, which works with offenders, said new measures to deal with fine defaulters were "long overdue".

She said: "For too long, courts have locked people up simply because they find themselves in difficult financial straits and cannot pay fines. That leads to a situation where people who have committed relatively minor offences find themselves behind bars with all the resulting impact that has."

Last night, Cathy Jamieson, the justice minister, said proposals to make payment of fines directly from salaries or from benefits were being looked at, in addition to the greater use of supervised attendance orders.

She said: "I recognise that there needs to be attention given to the use of imprisonment for fine default.

"Supervised attendance orders have already been established as a credible alternative for sheriffs instead of imprisonment. There remains an issue over the effectiveness of the payment of fines for minor offences and an ongoing review of the summary justice system is currently looking at this."