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Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Order 2005

I thank the Minister. I concede that this is a tidying up order, but it is a difficult one to handle in this way. Each one of these parts is worthy of significant debate. As I said earlier, I am never happy that the Secretary of State can add additional authorities as he wishes to anti-social behaviour orders. We have to assume that he will do the right thing, but it is a serious situation. On the other hand, I accept that other authorities possibly should have that power. When I asked the officials this morning I was encouraged to learn that that power will not be given to private sector landlords and so on. I think it is right that housing associations should have it; I think it would have been quite wrong for any parts of the private sector to have similar rights. I just wanted to note that. I understand that the provisions under prisons and the recall of life prisoners on licence and so on have no impact on anything to do with the Good Friday agreement and those who were released and who may have been re-arrested under that legislation. With regard to the transfer between young offender centres and prison, I understand that the decision is not going to be made by independent monitoring boards any more, but will be made by the authorities running the young offender centre. I do not think that that is a very good change. It seems to me that an independent body should be involved in that. If someone has been making a serious nuisance of themselves and become unmanageable within a young offender institution, it does not seem to me that the manager of that institution should make the final decision to send the youngster off to goal or to a proper prison. After all, that decision could send the young person down a road for the rest of his life. I would have liked to have felt that there were a series of independent minds on that, and it should not be left with the management of the youth offender centre. I support youth conferencing and any legislation to include 17 year-olds. In regard to road traffic legislative changes, I also support Articles 18 and 19 and blood samples being taken under different circumstances. Self-funding for speed cameras is—the noble Lord will almost certainly agree with me—an ongoing debate. Their success and failure, the way they are managed and the moral issues behind them, whether local authorities use them to make huge sums of money for themselves and save their ratepayers or whatever, is still very much up for grabs. I note that I have read recently in the press that some local authorities and maybe government are having second thoughts about the effectiveness of speed cameras. I read that in certain areas the death toll has gone up where there are a large number of cameras. One might ask why. I suspect that it is because people are searching for the camera and not looking at what is going on in front of their motor car. I was going to use the word ““ragbag””, but it is not a ragbag, it is very sound legislation, which comes from all parts of the overall legislative scene in Northern Ireland. It is quite hard to take on the situation as a whole. The reference to the new legislation on victims of crime, again, is an ongoing debate in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. The victim information scheme would ensure that the victim of a crime knows as much as possible about the offender or the person who has attempted to murder them, stalk them or whatever. Any improvement on victim information has to be a good thing. In principle, I support the order, but it is very difficult to debate in the way that we are.