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Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Bill

I do not have that information offhand, but I shall seek to find out whether it can be provided to the House later today. However, judging by the seriousness of the offences involved, there is a high probability that almost all those defendants will be in custody. There is much else that we are doing to tackle those crimes, which strike so much fear among the public. We have upped the minimum sentence for knife crime, from two years to four, and established a minimum sentence for the carrying of guns. Last September, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary set up a guns and gangs action programme in parts of four cities—London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester—where the problem has been most prevalent. Since the announcement, there has been a 51 per cent. drop in firearms-related injuries and a 27 per cent. drop in all recorded firearms offences in those four areas. In the programme area in London, there has been a 53 per cent. drop in firearms offences and a 68 per cent. drop in such injuries. Sentence lengths generally have increased, too. One key driver of the dramatic increase in the prison population over the past 11 years has been a 60 per cent. increase in the number of serious and violent offenders brought to justice and then incarcerated for long periods. Anonymised evidence and the safety of key witnesses are fundamental to getting the nasty, greedy and ruthless criminals who perpetrate those crimes off the streets. Assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, John Yates, said in an article in The Daily Telegraph on 21 June responding to the Davis judgment that, as a result of the provision for anonymised evidence taking, the detection rate for such murders—yardie, Operation Trident murders—had risen to about 85 per cent., up from, he said, around 40 per cent. in the mid to late 1990s. However, the proportionate use of such evidence goes much wider than that. Undercover police officers and agents need protection if, for example, drug dealers and terrorists are to be brought to trial. So do communities where criminality and intimidation may not have quite the same life-threatening consequences, but can still ruin the lives of decent people. Closing down an off-licence that is selling drink to juveniles and acting as a magnet for drug dealing and disorder could be dismissed as trivial from the comfort of a leafy part of town, but not if it is down your street. The Bill seeks to ensure that when there is witness intimidation of a serious kind, and when other measures of witness protection, many of which have been put on to the statute book in recent years, are not adequate for the task, the evidence of the witness can be anonymised if the court accepts it and it is regarded as fair.