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Coroners and Justice Bill

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for telling me something that I already knew. I did not hear him comment when others described this as the Waddington amendment, but there we are. He is quite right: when it comes to the vote, it is a matter of the clause standing part. I thank him for telling the Committee that. Let me deal with the police. Some of the concerns we heard last year and this year involved examples which were regarded, perhaps not surprisingly, as inappropriate and overzealous action. As I understand it, those examples concerned public order offences in Sections 4A and 5 of the 1986 Act, which relate to harassment, alarm or distress. The crucial point is that those offences have a substantially lower threshold than the offence we are discussing, cover a wider range of behaviour and carry a lesser maximum penalty. There may indeed be a considerable case for giving the police more detailed guidance about those particular public order offences. But I have to say that I am not aware of similar concerns in respect of the offence of inciting religious hatred, which has a similarly high threshold. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, talked about changes in the police approach. I am afraid that I have to say to him and to the Committee that any changes in the police approach over the past year, if indeed there has been a change at all, actually have nothing to do with what was formerly described as the Waddington amendment, for the simple reason that the offences of inciting hatred on grounds of sexual orientation are not yet in force—they are not yet in force at all—and there has been a supposition in this debate that somehow they have already been in force. They have not been. We are not aware that ACPO has expressed any view either way on Clause 61. My experience, and perhaps that of other noble Lords, is that ACPO is not slow in coming forward with its views on matters of this kind.