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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I have provoked exactly the response I had hoped for from the noble Earl. I am aware that time is short today. This is the fourth and last day of Report. Although the reason for those circumstances can be laid largely at the Government’s door, I do not want the Government to think that we will be in any way obstructive, and we shall certainly try to progress matters as rapidly as we can. The matter of self-defence has already been discussed fairly fully in Committee, so it is not necessary for me to go through the arguments I made in support of my amendment with the same thoroughness today; I think they are well recalled. The origin of self-defence in the Bill lay in the proceedings of the Labour Party conference last autumn and an undertaking given by the right honourable gentleman Mr Straw to bring the matter forward. I intend to make no further comment about the consequences of that in the Bill. My amendment addresses one particular set of circumstances: those in which an individual is confronted by a trespassing intruder on building premises. The amendment is cast in terms of buildings generally, but we had particularly in mind a situation in which a trespasser entered someone’s home, probably during the hours of darkness. We have taken a different approach from the one normally taken by the common law, which is to substitute the concept of proportionality for the concept of reasonableness. In other respects our approach does not change; in other words, instead of applying a test of what was reasonable in the circumstances in which the defendant saw them subjectively, the test we wish to apply is that of gross disproportionality in the circumstances as the defendant subjectively saw them. We believe that is a clearer test and, in the circumstances of an intruder late at night where someone is perhaps awakened from peaceful slumber, a more appropriate test. Subjectively, the situation is likely to be extremely alarming. That, of course, applies to the subjective circumstances. We go on to say that unless the person into whose house the trespasser has entered behaves grossly disproportionately, the benefit of the doubt of the law should be on his or her side. That should be distinguished from other circumstances in which the law of self-defence applies. I explained the background to this in Committee. I have simply set out the principles of our amendment and I propose to leave it at that. I beg to move.