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Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Bill

That is absolutely correct. This is a way of getting away from the purely paper process that has developed in some courts. The Government have said that there is an inherent jurisdiction, but their point has two problems. One has already been raised. It is that there does not seem to be any inherent jurisdiction in the magistrates court. The other way out of that problem, of course, is not to extend the power to the magistrates court in the first place. The second problem is that a large number of judges will be surprised to learn that they have that inherent jurisdiction. The best way in which to draw that jurisdiction to the attention of the judiciary is to put it in the Bill. There is also a problem with the scope of the Bill. I do not want to go into detail about that now, as we will come back to the issue in Committee. However, I have raised one point about it, and I shall mention it again. Why does the procedure extend to the magistrates court? It is not obvious that there are that many such cases in the magistrates court in the first place. If, as the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) mentioned, a case is triable either way, presumably the issue could be one of the factors that can be taken into account in sending the case to the Crown court instead. I admit that there would be problems in respect of youth justice, but those should be faced as a separate issue and should not govern how we deal with the whole problem.