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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, we support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for one simple reason. There must be some limit to the time following the serving of a sentence when a VOO can be imposed. If there is no limit, for the rest of someone’s life—it could be 20 or 30 years—there is always the possibility that a penalty might be imposed; not for committing another offence but simply because of an assertion that there is a real risk that he might commit some other offence. That is fundamentally wrong. We can have an argument about what the limitation period should be. We believe that 10 years is an adequate time. For that reason we are strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace.