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Coroners and Justice Bill

Absolutely. It would be a far better procedure to put the whole question into the hands of the judiciary in the first place, rather than into the hands of the Secretary of State. Part of the background problem is that the Executive distrust almost everyone else. In the Counter-Terrorism Bill, they attempted to take control of the selection of judges: that proposal was got rid of, but they are still obsessed with having some control over getting rid of anyone in the process who they feel might not be on their side. That leads me to another point—the link that the Bill makes between the use of intercept evidence and the absence of a jury. I and many other hon. Members favour greater use of intercept evidence in the criminal justice system in general, and I believe that many of the Government's objections to that are incomprehensible when compared with what happens in other countries. I welcome this small chink in the Government's previous opposition to the use of intercept evidence in court, but I do not like at all the way the use of intercept evidence is linked with getting rid of the jury. The idea that intercept evidence can be used only when members of the general public are excluded from a case would be a dangerous precedent to allow when it comes to the future development of this part of the law. I object to the red rag, but the Secretary of State talked about the possibility of different proposals coming forward and of amendments being accepted. For that reason, I suspect that the person who holds the red rag will be tempted simply to put it away once the bull has charged, as it will have served its purpose and attracted our attention. Even so, if the Government are interested, I will take up their offer of trying to work towards a better solution to the problem. I turn now to the rest of the Bill and all the square miles of text that separate the red rag from the contraband. Some of the material—such as the references to knives and criminal memoirs—is plainly designed for the media grid. By the way, the provisions relating to criminal memoirs contain an amazing section that enshrines populism in statute. When deciding what to do about criminal memoirs, the court will have to take into account whether the public would be offended by the criminal making money out of them. The Bill might as well say that the court should pay attention to what the editors of the Daily Mail and The Sun think. I do not oppose everything in the Bill, as some of its provisions are to be welcomed, but I believe that parliamentary scrutiny of the rest of it will be largely prevented by the fact that so many different subjects have been jammed together. However, some of the material in the Bill needs more than just tidying up, because it is seriously misguided. I am referring to the attempted reforms of the law of murder, which the Secretary of State passed over very rapidly in his speech. The impact assessment reveals that the intention of the reform is to convict more people of murder and fewer of manslaughter. It talks about 100 to 200 more murder convictions over the next eight years, at a cost of between £4 million and £8 million. People will no longer be convicted of manslaughter: they will be convicted of murder instead, but who will those people be? One group who will be convicted of murder rather than manslaughter might be mercy killers. At present, they are often—but not always, as a case last year showed—convicted of manslaughter, rather than of murder, by reason of diminished responsibility. That is because the present definition of manslaughter is fairly loose. It says that a person"““shall not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind””" arising from inherent causes"““as substantially impaired his mental responsibility””." That is quite vague stuff, and it allows prosecutors and courts some leeway when deciding whether to go for a charge of murder or manslaughter. Under the Bill, however, the defendant will have to have suffered from a specific, recognised medical condition, and not just from some ““abnormality of mind”” or other problem. Moreover, the Bill requires the condition involved specifically to have caused the homicide, and not just reduced the defendant's responsibility for it. There are different views on mercy killing. Personally, I oppose euthanasia, but I cannot see what good it does to hand out more mandatory life sentences to mercy killers as opposed to letting the judge decide the penalty. That penalty might be life, but need not be in any given case. The current law includes a phrase about the arrested development of mind, but this Bill leaves it out. Combined with the strict causation requirement, and given what happens in the courts now, that seems to me likely to mean that another group of people—those with learning difficulties—will be convicted of murder rather than manslaughter. Why do the Government want that to happen? I turn now from diminished responsibility to provocation. There is further confusion in the Government's proposals on provocation, which have been variously described as ““a dog's breakfast”” and ““a pantomime horse””. One group of defendants who under the new definitions might well find themselves convicted of murder rather than manslaughter—although that would be contrary to what the Government apparently intend—are abused wives. The Bill retains a condition in the current law that has often thrown into doubt an abused wife's ability to use a provocation defence. That condition is that there must be a loss of control. I am not a criminal lawyer, so I have always been rather puzzled by the requirement in the law that there must be a loss of control for provocation to reduce murder to manslaughter. It seems to me that, apart from contract killings, all murders involve some sort of loss of control, but I am reliably informed that that is not the view that the law takes and that wives who kill their abusive husbands by waiting for them to go to sleep and then attacking them, for example, are usually said not to have lost control. The Bill seeks to overcome that problem by declaring in clause 41(2) that"““it does not matter whether…the loss of control was sudden.””" That does not seem to help at all. Loss of control must happen at some point. Someone has control, and then they do not. In some cases, there might be a longer lead-in time for the loss of control—it might take a longer time, rather than a shorter one, to lose control—but in the end, there comes a point where control is lost. A statute can do many things, but it cannot change reality. An abused wife will have to show that she lost control at the point that she killed to qualify under the statute. If she has not lost control at that point, she will still be guilty of murder. The Government also say that clause 42(3) means that it is enough to convert murder to manslaughter through provocation, or what replaces it, to fear serious violence from the husband, but that is not what the clause says. It says that a loss of control can be attributable to such a fear. If there is no loss of control in the first place, the fear is not relevant. So I fear that, under the Bill, the 100 to 200 extra convictions for murder will include abused wives. Another type of defendant—perhaps it is one with which Members will have less sympathy, but such cases happen—who will be convicted of murder under the Bill, as opposed to manslaughter, is those currently covered by the Doughty decision: parents who were previously loving and caring but who, under pressure of stress and fatigue over a long period, suddenly snap and kill their children. They are not threatened with serious violence, but neither do they have, in the words of the statute,"““a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged””." Such people would not be able to bring themselves at all within what those words describe. They lose their temper, although under serious stress. Perhaps the Government intend that such defendants should be convicted of murder, rather than manslaughter, and receive the mandatory life sentence, but they have not said so, and it is unclear to me why they would want that. Who are the 100 to 200 people? The Government presumably think that there will be a whole new group of men convicted of murder, rather than manslaughter, by virtue of the sexual infidelity clause. I doubt very much whether there are many cases of that sort at all, at least in England. There was one such case in Scotland not so long ago. As far as I can tell from the past 10 or 20 years, that attempted defence usually fails. These days, if sexual infidelity is relevant at all in a murder case, it is relevant in terms of diminished responsibility, rather than provocation, so I do not think that the prisons will be filled with men who previously would not have received a mandatory life sentence by reason of a crime passionnel. In fact, as the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield mentioned, the existence of that clause is somewhat puzzling. Why has that form of provocation been picked out for legislative treatment when other forms have not? The other form of provocation and loss of control that has not been picked out for special mention and been ruled out by the Bill relates to honour killings. I am surprised that the Government seem to have gone that way. Disturbingly, the Bill seems to be almost designed to allow honour killings to count as manslaughter, not murder. The Human Rights Watch definition of honour killing is"““acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonour upon the family. A woman can be targeted by individuals within her family for a variety of reasons, including refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce—even…allegedly committing adultery.””" Let us take the example of a woman who refused to enter into a forced marriage. The Bill potentially treats such a case as one of losing control by reason of having a sense of being seriously wronged. Admittedly, the word ““justifiable”” comes into the definition, but the question is: justifiable to whom? The Bill does not say, and in any case the issue seems to be left eventually to the jury. The same point applies to other parts of the definition. In picking out sexual infidelity, but not picking out honour killing, the Bill is doing something quite disturbing. The whole attempt to deal with the law of murder seems to be arbitrary. I urge the Government to recognise that clauses 39 to 43 are a mess and should be withdrawn. I do not want to take much more time going through the other 28 topics in the Bill, but I should like to make a few brief comments on the rest of the Bill. On suicide websites, I note with alarm that the relevant clauses are not in any way confined to the specific issue of suicide websites but will replace the whole of the present law on encouraging and assisting suicide, by removing any sense that the encouragement or assistance of suicide must be aimed at a specific person or group of people. No one, especially parents, can condone those irresponsible and dangerous websites that encourage possibly unstable young people to take their own lives, but encouraging suicide, which is what those websites do, and assisting suicide are different things. Encouraging suicide takes place before the person has decided to commit suicide and is entirely reprehensible, whether it is aimed at a specific person or at the world in general. In that sense, what the Government are doing is right, but assisting suicide can, by contrast, occur after the person has autonomously decided to commit suicide. Many hon. Members think that assisting suicide is also wrong, but if it is wrong, it is a different sort of wrong from encouraging suicide. Other hon. Members think that assisting suicide is not necessarily wrong if the right sort of safeguards are in place. That, of course, is the position of my party. Admittedly, some forms of assisting suicide could amount to encouraging suicide in some circumstances, but that is precisely what the debate on safeguards is about. I should like the two issues of encouraging suicide and assisting suicide to be clearly separated, and the Bill simply does not do that. On anonymous witnesses, I simply note that the Bill does not deal with the central problem that was raised when we discussed the temporary Bill last summer: the provision of independent or special counsel, which would overcome many of the difficulties that that Bill produced. The provision on the anonymity of witnesses in investigations seems useful, but will it really help? There is a serious problem with witnesses not coming forward in gang-type crimes, but the Government are suggesting that it will be a crime for someone to give the name of someone about whom an order has been made to another person, where an investigation has taken place into gang crime. The question is: who will be the defendant in such a prosecution? The answer, it seems, is that it could only be a police officer, so we are making it a crime for a police officer to give out the name of a potential witness. Let us think about the reality of the situation. Will it really have a big effect on potential witnesses from estates threatened by gang violence if the police can say to them, ““Don't worry, we'll make an order protecting your identity, and if it is broken, the police will prosecute the police””? That does not seem a very practical idea on how to increase the confidence of witnesses. Witnesses are certainly threatened; I do not deny the existence of the problem, but the measure seems more symbolic than real. I urge the House to look at clause 87, which deals with the examination of the accused through intermediaries. It is about the problem of what happens when someone is suffering from a mental illness or other disability and cannot give evidence. There is already provision for ordinary witnesses to be asked questions through intermediaries; that is there to help them. The Bill extends that facility to defendants, but there is a serious question: if a defendant cannot understand the proceedings to the extent that they need that help, why are they on trial? Why are they not unfit to plead? So far, the Government have produced no explanation on that. The Bill contains a lot of good stuff about video-recording evidence and live links, but I have a question on clause 94, in which the Government propose a subtle amendment to section 138 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. It looks good, except for the fact that the provision has never been brought into force, although the Government have had six years to do so. Why are they amending something that they could not be bothered bring into force in the first place? I have a similar question on the bail provisions. I can find no impact assessment on what effect changing the rules on bail for those charged with murder is expected to have. At any one time, about 50 or 60 people accused of murder appear to be on bail. How many of those people do the Government expect to be remanded in custody as a result of the Bill, and what change do the Government expect that to make to a person's chances of being the victim of murder? My final point is on the sentencing council. The Government are to be congratulated on not falling for the most prescriptive models for sentencing guidelines, although they have chosen a fairly restrictive model. They are also to be congratulated on the provision that the Secretary of State mentioned, under which the council should take into account the relative effectiveness of sentences in preventing reoffending. I agree strongly with what the right hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth said about what works; that has to be built into the criminal justice system from top to bottom. The problem is that the Government seem to be pursuing two entirely different criminal justice policies in the same Bill. The model of the grid that they put forward seems entirely predicated on the seriousness of the offence and the harm caused. When it comes to carrying out the guidelines in practice, as opposed to talking vaguely about them, the guidelines have no room for preventing reoffending. For the success of restorative justice programmes, what matters might well be whether the offence was committed against a specific human victim—the right hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth mentioned this point—who is willing to take part in a process of restorative justice. For treatment options, such as treatment for drug and alcohol misuse, the personal characteristics of the offender might matter more than the nature of the offence. The sentencing ranges that the Government have chosen are built entirely on the retribution view of sentencing. In practice, that view will completely squeeze out all the things that the right hon. Gentleman and I want to see in those guidelines. That matters, because although the Secretary of State is right that putting the victim at the heart of the criminal justice system is important, it is also important that we consider not only present and past victims, but future ones. The purpose of the criminal justice system must be to ensure, as far as is possible, that there are as few future victims as possible. I therefore ask the House, for the reasons set out in our amendment, not to pass the Bill today. It contains some good proposals, but also dangerous proposals on data sharing, and proposals on secret inquests that are, though a red rag, undesirable. A lot of the rest of the Bill seems ill-thought-through, rushed and muddled.