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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

The noble Lord has made a very good opposition point for me, for which I am very grateful because I have been saved about 15 seconds of my speech which I would otherwise have delivered. We believe, for the reasons that I explained earlier and the distress that this matter has caused so many people, that the objective part of the test should displace the word ““reasonable”” with the words ““grossly disproportionate””. It was suggested by the right honourable Mr Straw that this might conflict with the human rights convention. Indeed, I believe that some support for this view was given by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I think that that assertion is certainly not proven and, in my view, very difficult to substantiate. There is inevitably an element of disproportionality in the test already because of the subjective ingredient. Moreover, the civil test a criminal who has been injured in some way or other by the householder has to meet to succeed in an action against the householder is precisely that of gross disproportionality which the Government proposed to adopt in the 2003 criminal justice Bill. I accept that that is a civil and not a criminal test, so strictly speaking it does not contravene the European convention; but nevertheless it is a test that the Government have already deployed. If there is to be a real change in the law upon which the householder can rely, in our view the way that we have cast this amendment in terms of gross disproportionality meets exactly what Mr Straw said he wanted in October 2007, and from which, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has rightly pointed out, he has resiled. I beg to move.