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Home Affairs and Communities

On consideration, the hon. Gentleman might want to withdraw the word, ““gerrymandering””, which did not happen. The Electoral Commission issued serious proposals on how postal voting should best be conducted, and all the main parties agreed on their implementation. We are currently examining a set of issues that arose subsequently and we will decide the best kind of legislation to introduce, but none of the issues concerns gerrymandering. My Department and I want to address three main pillars of activity through legislation in this House—first, police, counter-terrorism and active communities; secondly, offender management and the reform of the criminal justice system; and thirdly, immigration and asylum and identity cards. The first pillar—police, counter-terrorism and active communities—involves four proposed pieces of legislation dealing with charities, racial and religious hatred, counter-terrorism and violent crime. On charities, we are reintroducing the Bill that fell when the House was dissolved. It will modernise and reform charity law and enable charities to administer themselves more efficiently and to be more effective. I do not know whether the Bill will receive all-party support, but I know that the charity world is delighted by the legislation and that it found it difficult to understand why some parties blocked the legislation in the previous Parliament. During the wash-up at the end of the previous Parliament, we could not obtain agreement to the second piece of legislation, which is an attempt to outlaw incitement to religious hatred by amending the current offence of incitement to racial hatred. The legislation will close the loophole whereby Jews and Sikhs are covered by the racial hatred offence, but other faith groups are not. It will curb the activities of extremist groups, which could incite hatred against members of minority faiths, and it will protect those who are subject to incited hatred on the basis of religion. I know that the measure is controversial—hon. Members on both sides of the House are worried about some aspects of the legislation, so it will be fully debated—but I strongly believe that it is important to put all faith groups on a similar footing and to deal with the incitement of hatred. The Bill is about stopping incitement to hatred, which is what we shall do, and I hope that all parties give it full consideration.