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Serious Crime Bill [HL]

My Lords, I put my name to these amendments for two reasons. First, there is understandable wide public concern about the remarkable growth of the kind of crime covered by these amendments. We have had far too many cases recently, not least in London, of people murdered in the course of crime. It seems odd, when we have a schedule listing serious crime, that crimes which the public probably think are about as serious as anyone can contemplate are not included in the list. I commented in Committee on the provisions in the schedule to deal with environmental crimes. There was a flurry of contributions about the importance of dealing with prohibited implements for fishing and such matters. As a former chairman of the National Rivers Authority, I had the responsibility for eight years for seeing that that kind of thing was prevented and that if people attempted it, they were prosecuted. Similar, with some success, we set about preventing the harmful deposit of waste and so on. We never found it necessary to contemplate the kind of provisions contained in the Bill, yet they are in this schedule, as are a number of other matters that no doubt in their way are crimes we should prevent, such as ““illicit recording””, but which do not seem to be quite on the level of robbery with knives or guns that is likely to lead to death. If the Government are not going to provide for that kind of offence themselves, we need to have some fairly compelling reasons for including some matters in the schedule that do not appear to be of quite such a serious nature while omitting something that the public might think should be very high up the list of matters covered.