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Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

I do not want to go on with this too long, but I was really picking up what the Minister was saying about the whole criteria rather than the technical details of the amendment. I have been worried ever since I looked at this business of questions of penalty and levelling being dealt with by young officials under attempted efforts in statutory instruments to give detailed criteria as to how you do justice in all cases, when you cannot really temper them to the individual case. As I emphasised in my long speech before, it is an essential part of the whole prosecuting system that it has not only got to be evidence of guilt but it has to be in the public interest to prosecute. If all minor cases were prosecuted, there would be a revolution. People would just be fed up with having officials on their backs. That is a worry to me, and I hope that the Minister will persuade us that this is not in the Government’s mind—although I do not ask for a long answer now. I do not think that it is in the Government’s mind, but we might get to a position where it happened.